3-D Printer

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A 3-D printer is a machine that prints objects by laying down successive layers of plastic or other
materials. 3-D printers have existed since the 1980s. Today, several companies are working to create models
that are available for personal use and at a low price point. In the last few years, the rise of 3-D
printers in rapid prototyping has popularized and democratized the creation of objects at an individual
level, proving that there is a viable alternative to the previous dependence on industrial mass production.
This radical change has meant a turning point for a variety of fields, most notably biomedicine,
architecture, and design. Thus, 3-D printers are changing the way we understand and construct our built
environment.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin hosted a two-week period of programs focused on making in which visitors
used 3-D printers to do rapid prototyping. Portable 3-D printers were also developed, built, and donated to
various cultural producers in Berlin.

Accessibility Design

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Accessibility design is urban design that takes into account the full spectrum of other-abled (including
elderly, disabled, and handicapped) individuals by creating a user-friendly urban and domestic environment.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) was revised in 2010 to include regulations and standards
for accessibility design in the United States. Accessibility design allows for an urban landscape that is
more considerate of the needs of every citizen.

Designer John Schimmel and accessibility activist and organizer Raul Krauthausen conducted a workshop
intended to identify and map locations with and without equal access.

Active Transformation

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Active transformation is a state of continual movement, improvement, and change of the urban commons.
Motivated individuals can trigger moments of transformation, changing city life into something more
collaborative, sustainable, and conducive to well-being.

Lab Team member Rachel Smith’s Lab Platz program called attention to the importance of public space,
by transforming parking spaces for one whole day and turning them into places for leisure, cooking,
socializing, and learning.

The Marathon of Transformation gathered together a group of more than fifteen international and Berlin-based
influencers and transformers and presented the ways in which they are actively bringing about urban
change.

Activist Citizen

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Activist citizens are committed to community life and the urban environment. Rather than relying on
institutions or the government to fix things, they lead change independently and embrace active community
involvement. In 2011, Time named “The Protester” the person of the
year. This choice came after a turbulent year of uprisings in the Arab world that influenced the development
of the Occupy movement worldwide. These movements illustrated the central role activism plays in city life.

At the Lab, Ernst-Dieter Lantermann of the Institute for Psychology at the University Kassel examined
activist groups from a psychological perspective, exploring how activism works and what positive and
negative effects it can have on satisfaction in life. Lantermann argued that the way an individual sees
himself as a part of the larger society hugely affects that individual’s emotional well-being.

Aging Population

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Today, 20 percent of the population is older than sixty-five; in 2060, every third person will have
reached that age. The effect of the aging population on the urban environment and on social services is one
of the most significant global challenges and opportunities of the next fifty years. Intergenerational
exchange creates opportunities for knowledge sharing and social interaction. Urban design, community
initiatives, and public services can help meet the needs of young and old citizens alike.

The Ageless Evening at the Berlin Lab offered an evening of intergenerational encounters through cooking,
dance, age simulation, and more.

Anthropocentric Urbanism

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“Anthropocentric urbanism” refers to urban planning and city design that revolves solely around
the needs and desires of human beings. Mostly as a result of the anthropocentric theories developed during
the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the human being has long constituted the gold standard by which
all things are measured. Historical architectural styles have operated on this assumption for centuries.
However, more recent thinking and twentieth-century urban and environmental theories advocate for a
separation from anthropocentric thinking in urban planning and argue that it is this mindset that has caused
many of the challenges faced by cities today. Cities that flourished under an anthropocentric mindset were
not created with a larger context in mind that could be inclusive of the environment and other living
creatures.

Natalie Jeremijenko, artist and engineer, explained how artistic interventions and urban actions can be
successful prescriptions for a more inclusive urban design that tackles environmental issues including
pollution, overcrowded cities, and lack of wildlife in city areas.

Architecture of Necessity

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The architecture of necessity is design conducted by everyday citizens in response to individual or
collective needs and site-specific conditions. Due to political restrictions and/or low-income scenarios,
neighborhoods and individuals make customized and informal alterations to their living spaces, thus creating
innovative new typologies for architecture and urbanism. Ernesto Oroza coined the term in his 2006 book, For
an Architecture of Necessity and Disobedience, to refer to the efficiency and ingenuity of Cuban citizens
under Fidel Castro’s regime and their approach to self-made solutions for their everyday needs.
Virserum Art Museum has also used the term to talk about sustainability in architecture.

Ernesto Oroza led a two-part workshop at the Berlin Lab that had visitors documenting architectural hacks
in Berlin neighborhoods and compiling them into a customized tabloid. He also gave a lecture about the
Architecture of Necessity in Cuba.

Arduino

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An Arduino is a piece of electronic hardware—a single-board microcontroller used to create basic
hardware-to-software communication through circuitry control. Developed by a team of inventors led by
Massimo Banzi, Arduinos are widely used in computer programming. As an easy-to-use module, the device can be
employed to test basic programming functionality or even operate a small robot. The Arduino is particularly
practical for rapid prototyping. Its design is distributed under the Creative Commons license and low-cost
kits are available through a number of organizations.

At the Lab, Making Sense with ­Arduinos was a workshop that empowered visitors to engage with basic
electronics and programming in an effort to make small-scale interventions into our urban environment.

Behavior Change

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Behavioral change is an ongoing process of replacing the ways we respond to our environment with newly
acquired patterns of action. Behavior standards respond to social norms and needs; in an urban context,
certain targeted behavior-al shifts can lead to important changes in urban interaction and design. The key
to large-scale urban improvement lies in the majority of the population adopting and maintaining more
behaviors that produce small but incremental change for the common good. These could include more
responsible consumption and waste practices and greater conviviality and sharing.

Through his programs, which explored the power of technology in cities, Lab Team member Carlo Ratti argued
that sensing and actuating is a powerful transformative process that can lead to behavior change—the first
step in large-scale transformation.

Bike Sharing

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Bicycle-sharing programs provide bikes for rent or temporary use in urban environments. Today, there are
bike-sharing programs in 165 cities around the world. Bike-sharing systems typically involve customized bike
design, docking stations, and an affordable membership fee to avoid theft and promote financial
sustainability. Bike sharing provides free or low-cost transportation with no emissions. The system was
first employed in Amsterdam in 1969 when a fleet of bikes was painted white and distributed throughout the
city. Other cities with bike-sharing programs include Berlin (with two programs, started in 2003 and 2009)
Paris (2007), Barcelona (2007), and London (2010), among others. New York City will be launching one in the
spring of 2013. In major cities around the world, the programs are typically sponsored by major
corporations.

Cycling Fast Facts featured a group of biking experts to showcase a crosssection of the Berlin cycling
community to discuss the challenges and opportunities of biking in cities.

Copenhagenize Index presented a program at the Lab about the world’s most bike-friendly cities. The
Copenhagenize Index was developed in 2011 by Copenhagen Consulting as an index for measuring support of
urban cycling in cities worldwide. The index measures eighty major cities around the world based on
specific criteria including bicycle infrastructure, bike-sharing programs, perception of safety, and
politics. When these needs are met, cities experience an increase in cyclists, which has a positive
effect on city livability and infrastructure.

Biking and Traffic Regulations

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Biking and traffic regulations are the rules that ensure the orderly and safe operation and interaction of
motor vehicles, bicycles, pedestrians, and others during transit. More recently, some urban and traffic
planners have come to believe that over-regulation of traffic and pedestrian flows can be counterproductive
to the safety and efficiency of urban mobility, and that adequately designed, more flexible and intuitive
systems can lead to better mobility performance in cities.

Philipp Poll from ADFC Berlin e.V. ex-plained biking and traffic regulations and showed how pedestrians,
drivers, and bikers can be conditioned not to break traffic rules. Poll discussed how thoughtful design and
planning that responds to psychological responses to space can offer intuitive guidance for those on the
road. Such improved planning efforts can be more effective than mandatory rules in promoting road
safety.

Bicycle Safety

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Bicycle safety includes rules and strategies designed to protect cyclists from risks associated with
riding. Some of these include personal safety precautions like helmets and lights. Others require collective
action from government or community organizations including bikeways, traffic laws, and riding conduct.
Higher bicycle-safety levels result in a greater number of bicycle riders sharing city streets.

During the Cycling Fast Facts presentations, Jorg Leben spoke about the needs of cyclists and other road
users. He touched upon the importance of bicycle safety, the problematic of mixed traffic issues, the
inefficiency of pavers, and the issues of rights-of-way in different countries. Leben concluded that
sufficient space and keeping bikers away from main roads would lead to an increase in bicycle use.

Copenhagenize Index presented a program at the Lab about the world’s most bike-friendly cities. The
Copenhagenize Index was developed in 2011 by Copenhagen Consulting as an index for measuring support of
urban cycling in cities worldwide. The index measures eighty major cities around the world based on
specific criteria including bicycle infrastructure, bike share programs, perception of safety, and
politics. When these needs are met, cities experience an increase in cyclists, which has a positive
effect on city livability and infrastructure.

Body Language

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Body language is a form of non-verbal human communication. While we mainly focus on verbal strategies for
sharing information, body language is a powerful form of communication that connects with our senses. Most
of the communication that occurs in urban public space occurs through conscious or unconscious body language
signals. For this reason, understanding, learning, and analyzing body language is of crucial importance for
urban psychologists.

At the Lab, the programs devoted to the topic of Urban Micro Lens explored how all forms of communication
represent a skill that can be developed and perfected. When this is done successfully it can dramatically
improve our urban life.

Bottom-Up Urban Engagement

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Bottom-up urban engagement places the citizen at the root of urban change. The term “bottom-up”
first appeared in relation to its opposite, “top-down,” in the 1942 edition of Harvard
University’s Quarterly Journal of Economics: “In the long run it is
part of the larger question of whether ‘bottom-up’ control can be as efficient as ‘top-down’
control.” In an urban context, this approach has two key, complementary directions: first, a trend
that encourages social, cooperative models of city organization; second, a growing interest from government
officials, academia, and the professional sector in resorting to digital, open-sourced data and models as
key resources for understanding urban interactions.

Dietmar Offenhuber’s research centers on the possibilities and limitations of self-organized
infrastructure. Based on the work of the SENSEable City Lab, Offenhuber discussed the effectiveness and
potential of bottom-up infrastructure at the Berlin Lab in a lecture titled Can Infrastructure Be
Crowdsourced?

City Center versus Periphery

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The city center is often the location of the most significant, historical, cultural, and political
landmarks and institutions. At times, this area also serves as the economic hub, and is commonly frequented
by tourists. Hence cities are often characterized or known by the more stereotyped postcard visions of their
city centers. Traditionally, the center is the most highly valued area, in contrast with the city periphery,
which has often housed artists, immigrants, and those with low income. This creates a tension that leads to
various types of urban regeneration and gentrification process-es. Both areas require attention and can
serve as creative incubators and urban transformation sites for rapid gentrification. With the development
of megacities, the notion of center versus periphery is a blurred one, as cities develop multiple centers
and urban sprawl continues to expand urban surfaces beyond precise limits.

Maurice de Martin organized C-Zone, a tour of Berlin’s fringe and often-neglected outer ring in the
East Berlin neighborhoods of Lichtenberg, Treptow-Köpenick, and Marzahn. The tour visited local experts and
residents of non-central Berlin areas to underscore the fact that Berlin consists of more than just the
central zone more usually seen by tourists.

Cities as Idea Generators

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Cities are successful forms of organization because they attract people. And when people gather together
and interact, innovation happens and new ideas are generated. Thus, urban theorists and economists identify
cities as engines of progress and idea generation since their inception.

Identifying cities as centers for innovation and collaborative thinking, Barry Kudrowitz ran a workshop on
idea generation through improvisational practices that engaged visitors and encouraged them to interact.

Citizen Empowerment

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Citizen empowerment is the state of feeling that one’s actions actively contribute to urban
decision-making processes and change. By creating opportunities for communication and participation,
citizens feel empowered to contribute their time, energy, and ideas in the city.

Carsten Joost, a well-known Berlin activist from Media Spree Versenken, shared various strategies for
social involvement during his lecture at the Lab, while giving examples of how activists had changed the
urban landscape in Berlin.

Ernst-Dieter Lantermann of the Institute for Psychology at the University Kassel, examined activist groups
from a psychological perspective, exploring how activism works and what positive and negative effects it can
have on satisfaction in life. Lantermann argued that the way an individual sees himself as a part of the
larger society hugely affects that individual’s emotional wellbeing.

City as Organism

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“City as organism” refers to the similarity between an urban system and a complex live organism
formed by multiple, interrelated components. As with an organism, many of the elements that form a city are
not apparent to the naked eye, yet they are essential to the city’s ability to function. It is
important to give equal importance to both the visible and invisible areas of a city, as both are crucial to
its development.

Maurice de Martin organized C-Zone, a tour of Berlin’s fringe and often-neglected outer ring in the
East Berlin neighborhoods of Lichtenberg, Treptow-Köpenick, and Marzahn. The tour visited local experts and
residents of non-central Berlin areas to underscore the fact that Berlin consists of more than just the
central zone usually seen by tourists.

Climate Change

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Climate change is the slow alteration of weather patterns that occurs over time as a result of various
conditions, including natural geographic transformation, orbital variations, evolution, and human influence.
There is serious debate about the current and future repercussions of climate change. These effects may be
ultimately irreversible and are largely due to an increase in carbon dioxide levels—of which the highest
levels are produced in cities. Through large-scale governmental guidelines (such as the Kyoto Protocol of
1997) and individual initiatives, urban planners and citizens are becoming more aware of these issues,
resulting in more responsible design and lifestyle choices that can lead to urgently needed reductions in
emissions.

Climate Media Factory presented a session on climate change, cities, and mobility and questioned how we can
better communicate climate change to encourage more individual action. They presented a variety of methods,
including social media, which could encourage better education on Berlin’s climate-change data.

Closing the Loop

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“Closing the loop” is an expression used to define the closure of a process, from its inception
to its end, in a manner that leaves no loose ends. In the urban context, “closing the loop” is
increasingly used to allude to the effectiveness of digital-to-physical interactions in cities. Successful
uses of digital technologies in cities, through sensor devices or social media, for instance, are of no use
if they do not manage to achieve an impact on the physical world. That is, if we amass large quantities of
urban data through cutting-edge sensors, but we fail to implement a practical solution in the real world to
the questions the data was asking, we will not have closed the loop. Similarly, if we have thousands of
friends on Facebook, yet fail to meet anyone for coffee in weeks, the digital-physical loop is not
closed.

Carlo Ratti devoted a series of programs to the topic of Scripted Spaces in which he analyzed the ways in
which physical “actuation” has become increasingly important in the highly digital cities that
we inhabit.

Collaboration

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Collaboration—the act of cooperative work undertaken to achieve a common goal—is at the core of human
interaction. Since the beginning of civilization, people have gathered in search of protection,
conviviality, and exchange. Within cities, collaboration is crucial to the achievement of common goals for
improving the shared urban experience.

Lab Team member Corinne Rose’s Make Space project initiated and implemented a collaborative process
through which a group of senior citizens worked together to create a community garden in a Berlin
neighborhood. Through a blog that described the working process, the project functioned as a how-to guide
for brainstorming solutions for spaces for common use. The garden and blog also served as sources of
inspiration for residents and neighbors ready to transform a space of their own.

Collaborative Urban Mapping

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People have been documenting place and advancing the science of cartography for thousands of years. Unlike
early maps, today’s mapping offers the ability to display a plurality of data and information with a
high level of precision. Furthermore, the role of the cartographer as a singular author has been replaced
with a form of mapping that is produced through collaboration and open-source data sharing, leading to maps
that can contain several layers of information in one single digital source.

During the Marathon of Transformation day of programs, Joe Peach, the founder of This Big City, explained
how digital urban citizen engagement projects, in particular collaborative urban mapping, contribute to city
transformation.

Foodscape Mapping engaged visitors in collaboratively mapping waste and parasites, sewage systems, smells,
markets, and the food supply chain, as well as the economic trends in the area connected with food.

Comfort

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Comfort is a sense of physical or psychological ease, often characterized as a lack of hardship. Maximizing
comfort has not only fostered the ability to cope with sometimes grueling urban conditions, but it has also
become a measure of individual wealth, success, and status. Unfortunately, the irrepressible human
aspiration to find ease often creates behaviors that challenge individual health, ecological sustainability,
and economic moderation—hence the need to look for sustainable, responsible ways to find comfort in urban
environments.

Anton Burdakov’s Anchor Points program revealed how our perception of space can create feelings of
comfort and security by identifying whether we are inside or outside a so-called protected space.

Connectivity

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“Connectivity” refers to the ability to connect people in better, more efficient ways that
allow them to thrive to the best of their capacity. Cities have become the larger connective tissue that can
provide the basis for connective strategies. In urban environments, citizens can connect through the
proliferation of widespread technology, and just as importantly, through personal, narrative connections
that reflect microhistories of place.

As a nexus for the exchange of ideas, the Lab functioned as a connective hub for experts and non-experts
alike to put forward urban theories, test out new methods of urban participation, and share personal stories
of transformation and experimentation.

Through his programs, Lab Team member Carlo Ratti explored the power of technology in cities. In a video
for the Lab, Carlo explains how the Lab is a mobile platform that gives people an opportunity to think about
architecture and design—and how both relate to cities. Ratti points out that today, new technologies have
allowed people to connect and act on a different level and come together in new ways.

Creativity

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Creativity is the ability to make connections that are not necessarily obvious between seemingly
unconnected things, leading to new ideas. Associative learning theories support a variety of methods to
connect abstract concepts in our brains in order to find novel outcomes, thus promoting creativity.

Barry Kudrowitz led an active and engaged workshop and talk about idea generation and creativity and
suggested a variety of tools to increase innovative thinking, from mind mapping to games that can help
release our inhibitions. The most successful designers and thinkers don’t innovate through
seriousness, but through playful brainstorming and idea-association, which are proven to foster
creativity.

Crowdfunding

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Crowdfunding is a fundraising strategy that relies on the collective support of many individuals who
contribute a small amount of money to support a cause, start-up, artistic project, or relief fund. This
strategy relies primarily on the Internet to market needs and garner support. Websites like Kickstarter have
made this type of fundraising popular. The trend has extended to the world of architecture and design: a
variety of product-design and urban projects have sought funding through these avenues. Crowdfunding is a
symptom of a larger social trend toward sharing and gift-based transactions.

At the Lab, Coralie Winn and Ryan Reynolds from Gap Filler spoke about DIY urbanism and regeneration in
post-quake Christchurch, New Zealand, and gave examples of crowdsourced projects that had changed the fabric
of the city after a natural disaster; Heidemarie Schwermer developed her views on a society based on
sharing; and Van Bo Le-Mentzel presented his crowd-sourced Karma Economy project and book.

Crowdsourcing

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Crowdsourcing is a problem-solving model that relies on the voluntary sharing of information or skills
with others—a public group, a corporation, or other audiences. Often relying on the Internet as its
platform, crowdsourcing allows for collaboration and participation between a variety of people from
different backgrounds and levels of expertise. The term was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe, in an article for
Wired.

At the Lab, Dietmar Offenhuber discussed how crowdsourcing could be applied to city infrastructure. In this
talk, he gave examples of how this is being done and explained the main issues and possibilities of this
approach. Crowdsourcing is thought to be a tool that could create smarter cities by allowing the addition of
real-time sensing to all elements of an urban system.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel held a book-release event for a text that he created with collaborators from around the
world—a project that was facilitated through crowdsourcing.

Customization

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Customization is the method of respond-ing to individual needs and directives. Customization is often used
to refer to a shift in manufacturing and production to a more flexible methodology. The term, which dates
back at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century, was featured in the 1997 book Future Perfect by Stan Davis in which he discussed its application to mass
production. The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in products and services that are designed and
built to user specifications. Customization has the potential to transform the way we build and inhabit
cities, making them ever more flexible, personalized, and livable.

Dale Dougherty discussed the turn towards customization and personal fabrication rather than mass
production in his talk What is the Maker Movement? He claimed that making has created a prototyping
revolution that fosters experimentation, customization, and innovation.

Data Visualization

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Data visualization is the representation of information through graphs and other visual means. The purpose of data visualization is to translate complex data sets or subjective information into easily digestible, graphic forms, bringing together the practical need to communicate with an aesthetic sensibility. Visualizing urban behavior and patterns can create awareness about important urban conditions (traffic, cell phone use, bike use, pollution levels) and can also enable planners and other observers to diagnose situations that need improvement.

Decentralization

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Decentralization is the process by which elements of a whole are dispersed. The term is commonly used in
the context of government to refer to a process that involves a greater sharing of power among various
sectors and players. In the field of economics, the term refers to responsible investment strategies that
allocate funds to diverse lots, rather than keeping all assets in one place. In urban planning,
decentralization has been referred to as an alternative to cities’ central infrastructure and social
systems. A dispersion of centers is seen as a way to avoid dependency on a centralized system whose
malfunction could cause widespread disruption.

A key component of decentralization has been the increase in democratizing the uses of technology. This
concept was the core element of José Gómez Márquez’s programs at the Lab.

Deregulation

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Deregulation is a process whereby the government decreases its involvement and limits its amount of
regulations. It has been argued that, in some cases, deregulation can increase individual or institutional
initiative, which allows for more personalized and localized solutions to emerge in cities. However, the
term and its applications are the subject of highly polarized debate.

Ben Hamilton Baille, architect and urban designer, explained the principles of street design and
place-making by presenting new approaches to traffic engineering, speed, safety, and civility practices. He
claimed that deregulation of traffic and pedestrian rules is a crucial step towards street safety.

Design-Build

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Design-build is a process whereby the design and construction of a structure is conceived of and
implemented by a single entity. This process is particularly effective when working with students or
amateurs who can be exposed to the full spectrum of processes that go into the creation of a building or
development initiative. The term has been adopted by artists and architects who create temporary projects on
a short timeline.

The Lab hosted a four-day collaborative design-build project led by Peter Fattinger. Visitors were involved
in the brainstorming, planning, and ultimately the building process of this structure, which became a
temporary, mobile kitchen that later hosted cookouts and cooking events at the Lab and at offsite Berlin
locations.

Digital Democracy

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Digital democracy is the implementation of information technologies, communication technologies, and social
media in service of political and government processes. In a successful form, it provides broader citizen
participation while in-creasing transparency. Digital democracy also serves to increase accountability among
government agencies and the participating public.

The Open Governance Panel at the Lab discussed the influence of new technology on our communication and
decision-making processes. Panelists included Dieter Zinnbauer, Senior Program Manager of Emerging Policy
Issues, Research and Knowledge Group at Transparency International; Anke Domscheit-Berg, the founder and
director of opengov.me; and Helmut K. Anheier, Professor of Sociology and Dean at the Hertie School of
Governance.

Disneyfication

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“Disneyfication” refers to the transformation of the built environment to resemble the logic of
a theme park. While the term has been used broadly by social scientists, it was first coined by Sharon Zukin
in 1996. The term is used to describe a process of urban transformation that increases homogeneity and
simulated reality rather than the preservation of historical elements and cultural difference.

Cold War Center: Checkpoint Charlie sought to observe and analyze the prevailing spectacle culture that has
come to unfold in one of Berlin’s most iconic historic locations. The panel of experts discussed the
need for a Cold War museum at Checkpoint Charlie and the benefits or disservices that the theme park effect
can have on collective urban memory.

Do-It-Yourself (DIY)

35

“Do-it-yourself (DIY)” refers to an impulse to learn and make without relying on experts. The
term was first used in the 1950s as home improvements were popularized by a widespread shift to the suburbs.
Today, this approach has been adopted by skilled builders and hobbyists alike who have taken making into
their own hands to improve their domestic and urban environment.

Van Bo Le-Mentzel talked about his collection of DIY home and furniture design, instructions for which are
available for download online and in his new book, Hartz IV Moebel. The project seeks to democratize good,
cheap design and affordable homes, and engage people in the building process.

Electric Car

36

An electric car is an automobile that is propelled by partial or full electrical energy. Since the
mid-2000s, the production of electric cars has experienced a renaissance due to advances in battery and
power management technologies and concerns about peak oil prices and the environmental consequences of
carbon dioxide emissions. The current debate around electric cars points to the near-future possibility of
urban environments with 100-percent electric car usage. This would dramatically change urban spaces, given
the need to create charging and parking spaces for these new types of vehicles. The adoption of hybrid
vehicles, which combine oil usage with partly electric-powered engines, is a transitional step toward an
all-electric automotive environment.

Plug In Park Up explored e-mobility and the future of parking by inviting experts from the fields of
mobility, cycling, and climate change.

Emission Reduction

37

Emission reduction is a process of energy efficiency intended to decrease pollution. Cities have the
capacity to approach emission reduction in innovative ways, allowing for a full-systems approach to this
challenge.

During the Cycling Fast Facts presentations, Frank Müller, CEO, Urban-e GmbH, talked about how to replace
your car with a cargo e-bike. He showcased the advantages of e-bikes and cargo e-bikes and advocated for
replacing cars with electric bikes for more sustainable urban environments.

Emotional Connections

38

While today we have more and more digital friends, we experience fewer emotional connections in our “real-world”
daily lives. In growing cities, we are seeing a decline in the number, value, and duration of our physical
interactions with people. Designers and architects are approaching city planning in a way that facilitates
meaningful interactions.

Bubble Lab was an event meant to foster communication between strangers in an age of growing cities with
increasing-ly anonymous interactions. Strangers met and spoke, illustrating the need to communicate,
collaborate, and share common visions in urban life.

Emotional Intelligence

39

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the capacity to identify, measure, and control one’s emotions
and recognize emotional information as it is expressed by others. The EI, as opposed to the IQ (intelligence
quotient), is a measure of one’s capacity to perceive emotional signals. Peter Salovey, Daniel
Goleman, and John D. Mayer are the leading psychologists working on the subject, and have been active in
this area of study since the 1990s. EI combines the ability to perceive with empathetic emotions—critical
skills for urban dwellers who seek to create a more convivial social network.

At the Lab, Isabel Dziobek used the Emotionstrainer software to ask if our daily interactions would change
if we taught people how to better read emotions.

Empowerment Technologies

40

Empowerment technologies are innovative uses of technology that empower citizens in the process of actively
contributing to their built environment. Following a do-it-yourself philosophy, tangible actions like
making, building, and hacking lead to greater citizen participation and thus empowerment within the urban
environment.

The Lending Library and Engineering Genius Bar developed by José Gómez Márquez empowered visitors to use
technology to meet their own needs.

Environmental Footprint

41

The ecological footprint is an indicator of human pressure on the Earth’s natural resources. In
particular, it represents the amount of land or water needed to sustain a segment of the population or an
individual. Each year, the UN publishes a number that is calculated based on various metrics measuring
humanity’s stress on the environment, which is increasing at unsustainable rates, especially in
cities. A recent report claimed that by the year 2030 we will need approximately two Earths to support us.
This hyper-consumption is a pressing issue that requires everyone—from high officials to average citizens—to
commit to collective problem solving.

Natalie Jeremijenko, artist and engineer, explained how artistic interventions and actions can be
successful prescriptions for environmental issues including pollution, overcrowded cities, and lack of
wildlife in city areas.

Experiential Technology

42

Experiential technology is an immersive digital environment that allows citizens to experience an event or
a place without being there physically.

C.A.P.E. is a Computer Automated Personal Environment, created by the Brussels-based performance group
CREW, that was showcased at the Berlin Lab. Using guided virtual-reality headset devices, visitors explored
the site of the 2011 tsunami in Tohoku, Japan and took a walk through Brussels, questioning the limits of
reality and asking whether we even need to be in a city to experience it.

Experimentation

43

Experimentation is a word that comes from science and refers to methods of testing a thesis. It is a
process of action, reflection, and learning whereby new ideas can be tested and, if successful, implemented.
Experimentation is a key element of healthy cities, which should embrace challenges to the status quo and
seek ways to push thoughtful progress forward in creative, original ways.

The Lab project itself is a form of urban experimentation through creative urban interventions and
programs. At the Lab, certain experiments were also carried out, such as Testing, Testing!, an experiment
and study by the University of Waterloo’s Professor Colin Ellard, which launched at the Lab in New
York. Through Ellard’s ongoing initiative, visitors take part in a study of the emotional and
physiological effect of various urban spaces.

Food Consumption

44

Food consumption is the act of eating animal or vegetable elements in order to sustain life and provide
energy. Historically, the location of markets and food-distribution centers has been a crucial component for
the establishment and planning of cities, and has also affected economic and social transactions. Food is
not equally accessible in cities around the world: hunger affects 925 million people and 98 percent of them
live in developing countries. Cities are working to eradicate hunger through innovative new initiatives
facilitated by technology. Eliminating extreme hunger worldwide is one of the United Nations’
Millennium Development Goals.

Nicola Twilley, author of the blog Edible Geography and co-director of Studio X at Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, gave a talk and led a workshop that explored the need for making food
production and consumption processes in cities more transparent.

Forecasting

45

Forecasting is the practice of making predictions about events that have not yet occurred. Forecasting
typically involves data analysis and statistical methods to predict the future. Founded in 1968, the
Institute for the Future pioneered the field of forecasting and currently offers a compelling look into
future trends, possibilities, and challenges.

Matthias Böttger of Raumtaktik and DAZ (Deutsche Architektur Zentrum) involved a group of students from the
University of Montreal and other participants in a planning session at the Lab for the future of cities. The
participants broke into groups, and each one was charged with forecasting a future scenario for a city.

Future of Parking

46

Parking—the practice of storing one’s automobile—typically happens along city streets in blocks of
pavement reserved for the purpose. This practice of using street space for parking is draining city
infrastructure and space. As our cities become increasingly populous, we have less space to store cars. With
this in mind, “the future of parking” explores alternatives for personal automobile use and
storage.

The Parking 2.0 panel at the Lab explored the negative impacts of our existing personal mobility system
and what new demands urban parking will face in the near future. In addition, the daylong event, Labplatz
called attention to the importance of public space by transforming parking spaces into places for leisure,
cooking, socializing, and learning.

Gentrification

47

Gentrification is a global, urban phenomenon whereby underdeveloped areas are transformed. The process is
often coupled with rising rents, a shift in the social fabric of neighborhoods, and in many cases, the
influx of multinational corporations. Gentrification is one of the most polemic terms in urban discourse
today. To some it implies the beautification and positive development of previously underdeveloped areas.
However, it goes hand in hand with the negative effects of lower-income residents being priced out in favor
of those who can afford increased rent prices caused by the process of rapid transformation.

Tracking Gentrification was a gentrification tour led by urban curator Jurgen Breiter. For more than five
hours, participants had the opportunity to walk around two already gentrified areas: Mitte and Prenzlauer
Berg. The tour gave an insightful view of the origins, causes, and physical manifestations of gentrification
in the area, and analyzed how the same process is starting in the nearby area of Wedding.

Hackerspace

48

Hackerspaces offer a place for like-minded individuals to gather and share ideas and resources. Emerging
out of the Maker Movement over the past few years, hackerspaces have proliferated globally. Hackerspaces
serve a diverse group of individuals, most commonly those involved with engineering, science, computer
programming, art, and digital technology. By pooling resources and expertise, hackerspaces provide a
gen-erative platform for citizens to innovate and build digital and physical interventions in the city.

Bilal Ghalib talked about the proliferation of hackerspaces around the world in the last four years. He
shared his research into hackerspaces in countries in the Middle East, where governments have traditionally
been less supportive of open-source or free information, and how these spaces have created new opportunities
for learning and sharing.

Happy City

49

The Happy City is the concept that cultivating “urban joy” can dramatically improve the city on
an emotional, infrastructural, and economic level. Coming down to the core value of trust, citizens who feel
good about where they live are more likely to take care of it, spend money, and socialize with
strangers.

At the Lab, Charles Montgomery led a tour to test the theory that urban design can alter the way we feel
and treat other people. Later, he gave a talk about his research for his forthcoming book, The Happy City.

Hybridity

50

“Hybridity” is a term that originated in biology to refer to the offspring of two different
species. It has since been adopted by theorists working with identity politics, post-colonialism, race, and
multiculturalism. With their dynamic mix of cultures and ideas, today’s cities are places where
hybridity thrives.

In his talk about socially engaged architecture, Andres Lepik, Director of the Architekturmuseum of TUM,
discussed the new hybrid role of the architect and the shifts and ethical obligations that the architectural
profession now faces.

Mirko Zardini, Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), also discussed how he sees the role
of the architect evolving. The profession is changing rapidly and demands flexibility in addition to the
traditional, more defined work scope of architects and urban planners.

Influencer

51

An influencer is a person whose actions affect change on a large scale or within a group of people. The
term, commonly used in sociology, psychology, ethics, geopolitics, and economics, recently has been widely
adopted online to refer to websites or web content that exerts a strong effect on public opinion.

The Marathon of Transformation gath-ered together a group of more than fifteen international and
Berlin-based influencers and transformers who presented the ways they are actively affecting urban change.

Innovation

52

Innovation refers to activities at the forefront of society that challenge the status quo and push for
meaningful progress. Often used in the field of science, technology, and the arts, the term implies the
production of new ideas or notable improvements to existing ideas.

Toy designer Barry Kudrowitz led an interactive talk that focused on the connections between innovation,
humor, and play.

Intergenerational Interaction

53

Intergenerational interaction is the sharing of activities, space, and knowledge between the old and young.
As our aging population surpasses that of any previous time in history, it is becoming increasingly
important that the barriers, both physical and mental, that keep people of different ages apart are
removed.

Ageless Evening brought together psychologists, artists, and theater performers to create an evening of
intergenerational socializing and sharing.

Intuition

54

Intuition involves the use of sense-based abilities and the unconscious to make decisions rather than
relying entirely on reason or comprehensible, tangible information. Originating from Carl Jung’s
writings about ego in the 1920s, where he posited that intuition comes from a person’s clarity of
perception, the term has been used in the field of psychology and neurology to refer to right-brain
activity. Intuition is a key component for the creativity and innovation required in urban development and
design.

At the Lab, Gerd Gigerenzer argued that intuition can be a powerful tool for decision making and should be
considered more widely in addition to other hard data or reason-based methods.

Laser Cutter

55

A laser cutter is a device used to sever durable materials with a powerful, targeted laser beam. Originally
used in industrial manufacturing, the tool has recently been democratized for wide-spread use among
independent citizens, makers, and crafters.

During its first weeks in Berlin, the Lab housed a state-of-the-art laser cutter and ran daily workshops to
teach people how to use it to make customized creations.

Learning by Doing

56

“Learning by doing,” a theory that comes from economics, refers to the capacity of workers to
self-educate and improve their skills on the job. In the realm of pedagogy, it refers to a style of learning
that resists the traditional hierarchy of education and elevates practical activity and experience as viable
sources for knowledge. Architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright were important advocates of learning by doing
in architecture and design. These leaders in the field based their designs and educational methods on
teaching architecture students to make things with their hands in order to incorporate experience into their
theoretical education. Architects and designers can validate learning by doing by encouraging participation
by experts and non-experts alike, and by valuing participation over being correct or highly skilled.

Fattinger Orso Architektur, a Vienna-based design and fabrication studio, led a workshop in which
participants collectively conceived of, prepared plans for, and built a temporary outdoor structure over a
period of only four days.

Liegenschaftsfond politik (Property-fund politics)

57

Liegenschaftsfonds is the policy where-by city-owned plots in Berlin are sold
in a bidding process where monetary value determines the selling process. The policy raises a number of
important issues, including the privatization of public land and the support of organizations whose social
contribution is high, but whose operating budget is low. The Liegenschaftsfonds
was established in 2001 in Berlin as a company, the full shareholder of which is the city of Berlin.

Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the BerlinerLiegenschaften invited key stakeholders and politicians to discuss the crisis of the
sale of public land in Berlin.

Maker Movement

58

The Maker movement is a participatory, social culture that invites and inspires all kinds of people and
communities to invent, build, and hack. Making and doing with your hands encourages creativity, innovation,
and ultimately, design thinking. This mentality advocates for transparency in design and production and
resists built-in obsolescence. It also favors self-initiated production over consumerism. The Maker Faire,
which was founded by Dale Dougherty in 2006, is an important meeting point for makers worldwide, as are the
two leading maker-oriented journals, Make and Craft.

Dale Dougherty, founder of Make, explained the basics of the maker movement,
the attributes of a maker, and the long-term effects of the maker philosophy on personal life, business, and
culture.

Megacity

59

“Megacity” is a term used by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements to describe
“urban agglomerations” consisting of more than ten million people. One of the greatest
challenges facing society today is the rapid acceleration of the population concentrated in these urban
centers. Despite the challenges of megacities, they are thought to be the key to a sustainable future for
the planet, mainly due to their efficient concentration of services, products, and people.

As part of its film series, the Lab featured Megacities (Michael Glawogger,
Austria, 1998), a movie that tells stories of survival in four megacities around the world: Mumbai, Mexico
City, Moscow, and New York.

Minimum Variation—Maximum Impact

60

Large-scale change is usually the result of the accumulation of many minor changes. It is through this
minimal variation that we will achieve the maximum impact. Many architects and designers today are concerned
with making small changes in order to create a more sustainable and socially responsible city.

Architecture curator and historian Andres Lepik spoke about the social responsibility of architecture, art,
and design. Beyond its function, architecture has a strong influence on society: forms, materials,
proportions, and the design of buildings as a whole permanently shape the everyday life of individuals.

Mixed-Use

61

Mixed-use buildings are designed to incorporate a variety of uses for otherwise single-use structures.
Rejecting the notions that buildings should be confined to specialized or themed purposes and that people of
different ages and socio-economic status should be separate, proponents of mixed-use development seek to
encourage a healthy balance that stimulates social well-being, creative industries, and the economy at
large.

During his Happy City lecture, Charles Montgomery brought up examples of how the implementation of
mixed-used building in the city of Vancouver brought tangible examples of social improvement and
neighborhood development.

Multidisciplinary

62

“Multidisciplinary practice” refers to a collaborative approach that encourages those with
diverse backgrounds to contribute to a project or to solving a problem. The term can be traced back to
scientific publications of the 1930s and ’40s, where it was sometimes used to describe work conducted
across multiple fields. In our current age of over-specialization, multidisciplinary projects have a central
role in bringing together the most advanced knowledge from each area and applying it towards a common
goal.

The Lab itself is a multidisciplinary urban project that brings together experts from a multiplicity of
fields to focus on one topic: cities. All programs, collaborators, and staff of the Lab study cities from a
multidisciplinary perspective in order to crowdsource a richer, more holistic learning experience about our
urban environment.

Non-Expert

63

A non-expert is an individual who engages in an activity despite having no formal training or background in
it. This type of participation is essential to city development because cities are made up of individuals
who are not necessar-ily experts. Rather, these people have powerful lived experiences that can be harnessed
as valuable resources for identifying issues and solutions in cities. The notion of the non-expert resonatesin
the context of the rise of crowd-sourced urban initiatives. Relying on the power of the many
non-experts that constitute a city, such measures work to create a detailed piece of information or
infrastructure.

At the Lab, several programs spoke to the importance of the non-expert in city life, including The Power of
Intuition and Can Infrastructure Be Crowdsourced?

Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer argued that intuition can be a powerful tool for decision making and should be
considered more widely as a complementary addition to other hard data or rational-based methods.

Dietmar Offenhuber shared how crowdsourcing could be applied to city infrastructure. In this talk, he gave
examples of how this is being done and what the main issues and possibilities are. Crowdsourcing is
considered a tool that can create smarter cities by allowing the addition of real-time sensing to all
elements in an urban system.

Open Governance

64

“Open governance” refers to citizen access to government information, data, and processes to
enable widespread participation and collaboration in governmental decision-making processes. Often, this type
of engagement harnesses technology to facilitate a more active and open communication between citizens and
government, leading to more efficient use of budgets and improved quality of life for city dwellers. Open
governance has the potential to make urban governments more accountable to their citizens, while enhancing
the legitimacy of those in power.

The Open Governance panel brought together Dieter Zinnbauer, Transparency International; Anke
Domscheit-Berg, the founder of Opengov.me; and Helmut K. Anheier, Dean of the Hertie School of Governance to
discuss the possibilities and challenges of open governance.

Open-Source

65

“Open-source” refers to any software whose code is designed in such a way that the user
participates in the creation of data. The term was originally coined by a group of engineers in 1998 when
they founded the Open Source Initiative. This term is closely related to free software, Copyleft, and
Creative Commons—all initiatives that seek to democratize access to information.

Joseph Grima spoke about open-source architecture at the Lab. Grima analyzed this trend, which allows the
ideas of multiple people and especially end users to come together in the form of a built artifact.

Ownership of Public Space

66

Public space is a term that derives from the Latin word poplicus (people). It
describes the free use of shared land over which no one person has sole ownership. This concept of the
commons goes back to Greek and Roman ideals and has percolated throughout Western culture to shape the
notion of public space in contemporary cities. The right for people to peacefully assemble is inscribed in
the United States Constitution. However, in each country, public space and the right to it is defined
differently. Strategies that seek to give back public space to the citizens come as a reaction to the
elements of exclusion that can happen in public space.

Putting public space back into the hands of citizens was a core element of several Lab programs, including
Labplatz and Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the BerlinerLiegenschaften.

Labplatz called attention to the importance of public space by transforming parking spaces for one whole
day and turning them into places for leisure, cooking, socializing, and learning.

Free Space Berlin: A Panel Discussion on the Berliner Liegenschaften invited key
stakeholders and politicians to discuss the crisis of the sale of public land in Berlin.

Participation

67

Participation is the process by which citizens make valued contributions within any collective activity.
Participation is particularly important in maintaining a functioning democracy. Internet culture and
open-source platforms have in-creased citizen participation in recent years. The Occupy movement and other
participatory movements have also helped take citizen participation in urban social welfare to the next
step, generating citizen-involvement initiatives and questioning city governance that is neither transparent
nor participatory.

Ernst-Dieter Lantermann discussed the psychology of participation at the Lab in his lecture about social
involvement, while activist Carsten Joost described his lifelong experience as a highly participatory
citizen.

Place-Making

68

“Place-making” is a term that refers to a practice of making inclusive design decisions for the
well-being of all. Place-Making involves policy-makers, designers, and community members who are interested
in creating new urban environments and places that can bring people together and be conducive to various
needs.

Jörg Stollmann led a tour of Gropiusstadt, where he and his team are working with and for its residents in
a setting of community-based research and design. Their goal is to turn this urban complex, built in the
1960s, into a new place for improved design and social interactions.

Rapid Prototyping

69

Rapid prototyping—a model for quickly realizing new designs using 3-D printing and other digital
platforms—has caused a prototyping revolution in just the past few years. As the first and second industrial
revolutions signified a shift from the handmade to the machine-made to the assembly line, this third
revolution represents a dramatic shift in manufacturing. With 3-D printing technology, we are able to
produce at low cost, in low quantities, with minimal labor, and with a new level of precision and
customization. This technology is creating remarkable opportunities for the technology and medical fields;
for cities, rapid prototyp-ing allows us to dramatically alter the urban landscape to meet our needs at an
accelerated rate.

The Lab in Berlin hosted a two-week period of programs focused on making, where visitors used 3-D printers
to do rapid prototyping. Portable 3-D printers were also developed, built, and donated to various cultural
producers in Berlin.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

70

“Reduce, reuse, recycle” is the motto that has been adopted to educate and promote responsible
ways to discard waste while making it useful. The “three Rs” explain
a hierarchy of processing waste, with the first tier being the reduction of consumption, the second, the
reuse of existing materials, and the third, recycling.

Jo Royle, build project manager and skipper of the Plastiki, presented the Plastiki project: an
eighteen-meter-long catamaran built from 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles and other waste products.

Responsive Infrastructure

71

Responsive infrastructure is the theory that the relationship between user and system can allow for two-way
feedback. Responsive infrastructure is directly related to the notion of intelligent build-ings and smart
cities. Responsive city infrastructure systems are designed to measure, respond, and alter their services
and appearances based on a specific set of needs.

Poiesis Fellows Orit Halpern and Nerea Calvillo, together with Poiesis program director Harel Shapira,
discussed the dangers and opportunities of fully responsive cities, such as the extreme example of Songdo,
Korea—a city built from scratch and used as a testing ground for cutting-edge sensor technologies by Cisco
Systems.

Self-Regulation

72

Self-regulation is a model whereby the user is asked to monitor and control his or her own behavior, rather
than relying on an outside entity to do so. If properly implemented in cities, it can effectively mobilize a
participatory civic body that collectively monitors and improves city life without the input of policing or
heavy-handed control.

Ben Hamilton Baille, architect and urban designer, explained the principles of street design and
place-making by presenting new approaches to traffic engineering, speed, safety, and civility practices. He
claimed that deregulation of traffic and pedestrian rules is a crucial step towards street safety.

Self-Solving

73

Self-solving is a process of independent problem-solving facilitated by creative-thinking strategies. It
helps to build up people’s skills while minimizing their reliance on various federal and state
apparatuses. Self-solving is an important mindset for the responsible citizen, who, with the power of
technology or other means, can solve most of his problems without relying on the expertise of specialists or
the need to buy new devices.

Upstall Kreuzberg, a Kreuzberg-based group of architects and urban planners, presented their proposal for
the transformation of a coveted empty lot of land in the district of Kreuzberg. The five-hectare lot for
sale is owned by the federal government, and at risk of being sold to the highest bidder without
contemplation of the neighborhood’s qualities and needs. Upstall was founded in 2011 by a group of
professionals interested in active citizenship who took it upon themselves to responsibly develop the empty
lot based on a series of carefully considered criteria.

Sensor

74

A sensor is a tool that measures the prescribed physical quality or presence of something and communicates
that data through an electronic or digital device. Examples of common sensors include a thermometer, a
smartphone, or a carbon dioxide detector. Complex sensors are becoming ever more ubiquitous in
cities—especially as the popularity of smartphones increases—and are usually mentioned when discussing smart
cities. However, without a meaningful understanding and analysis of the data they are built to collect,
sensors can prove senseless and devoid of any real interest or usefulness.

Physical Objects That Talk Back was a workshop that explored how to turn inanimate objects into intelligent
devices that respond to human input.

Share Culture

75

Even though sharing is a concept as ancient as human culture itself, in recent years technology has enabled
sharing on an unprecedented level. Through community websites, live interface, and social media, sharing has
become a viable alternative to monetary exchange on- and off-line. Sharing is most common in transportation,
infrequent-use items, and physical spaces. While sharing thrives on a peer-to-peer level, it is also a logic
that must be considered in city planning to be implemented on a large scale as more people demand
carpooling, bike sharing, shared Internet connection, and other collective resources.

Heidemarie Schwermer shared her experience of living without money for more than sixteen years. She engaged
Lab participants in a conversation about how she has managed to live without her own apartment and with only
a few possessions, just by sharing.

Skill Share

76

A skill share is a platform for individuals to exchange knowledge. The most notable skill share, Skillshare
International, has roots in the Service Civil International (SCI), an organization established in the wake
of World War I to encourage servicemen across borders to share skills and services. In the city, this ethos
of skill sharing can create solidarity based on cooperation and generosity.

The Lab in Berlin became an active center for skill sharing between locals and international participants
and visitors. Workshops like the Lending Library and Engineering Genius Bar encouraged MIT program
organizers to share their skills with visitors and vice versa.

Smart City

77

“The smart city” refers to the city that offers both the physical infrastructure and the
technological apparatus to support a sophisticated, underlying information, communication, and sensing
network. The presence of cutting-edge technology in an urban environment does not, in itself, constitute a
smart city. Smart cities can only become such when the balance between technology and its benefits to people
is successfully achieved.

Poiesis Fellows Orit Halpern and Nerea Calvillo, together with Poiesis program director Harel Shapira,
shared their research about smart cities, with a focus on the city of Songdo, Korea.

Space Activation

78

Space activation is the practice of bringing life to unused urban spaces. Turning spaces into vibrant areas
can be undertaken by city governments or by individual initiatives. Spaces that are used and lived in
increase safety, encourage socio-economic interactions in neighborhoods, and lead to an improved feeling of
ownership and belonging to a city area.

Dynamic Public Spaces was an intensive two-day workshop led by researchers from the MIT SENSEable City Lab
and the Austrian Institute of Technology. The first part of the workshop covered the basic theory and
science of crowd dynamics and how humans act in public spaces. The workshop then continued with a hands-on
component where a group of visitors went to Alexanderplatz for a site-specific action. They altered public
space and, with the help of image processing and 3-D cameras, document-ed the effects of the
intervention.

Space Consumer/Space Producer

79

Individuals can be associated with two opposing attitudes when it comes to city space and how it is created
and used. Some may identify with the more passive approach of a consumer of urban spaces, while others might
consider themselves active space producers. The passive, consumerist behavior is encouraged by a more
capitalist trend of thought that imagines citizens as end receivers. However, leading urbanists and city
activists stress the importance of encouraging citizens to take on the producer role. Through ownership of
one’s space, changes and actions can be made in the fabric of our cities.

Lab Team member Rachel Smith’s Labplatz program called attention to the importance of public space by
taking over parking spaces and transforming them into places for leisure, cooking, socializing, and
learning.

Sustainable City

80

The sustainable city is engineered to create the smallest possible ecological footprint by employing
state-of-the-art conservation strategies and public education, and minimizing waste, pollution, and resource
consumption. Environmental consciousness in architecture goes back to Reyner Banham’s 1969 book, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Since then, the field of “green
urbanism” has grown and produced ecological strategies designed to maintain and build more sustainable
urban models. Many buildings seek LEED certification in order to be granted sustainable, green status.
However, more recent trends indicate that LEED certification for buildings does not solely determine
sustainability in design. Rather, LEED criteria should become the rule for responsible building, with an
additional set of behavior-centered practices leading the way towards more sustainable cities and buildings.

Making Environment explored how do-it-yourself technologies can enable citizens to better understand and
improve their environmental footprint.

Sustainable Tourism

81

The objective of sustainable tourism is to support the local economy by channeling the best assets of a
city into tourism in a responsible way. This can be achieved through communication, inspiration, and
positive deviance from tourism norms. The future of a positive, socially engaged tourism relies on
resilience, ecology, economy, and prosperity. Sustainable tourism is built on a foundation of social and
community connections and can thus empower citizens and neighborhoods.

Temporary Architecture

82

“Temporary architecture” refers to structures that are meant to exist only for a limited amount
of time. Sometimes, temporary architecture can also be mobile. Temporary architecture is not created with
the goal of permanence—rather, its value lies in the impact it can have on people within a limited period of
time. It can encourage architects to think on a more cross-disciplinary plane and inspire inhabitants to
act, think, and feel in unconventional ways. Temporary architecture can give a sense of place without
stasis, while challenging the concept of what a building can be. Temporary architecture also enables the
subversive. In a world of cloud living, temporary architecture has become the expression of a society in
constant flux.

The Temporary Architecture panel included Teddy Cruz, Estudio Teddy Cruz; Robert Kronenberg, Roscoe Chair
of Architecture, University of Liverpool, School of Architecture; Jürgen Mayer H.; Lena Kleinheinz, Magma
Architecture; and Peter Fattinger, Design-Build. The panelists engaged in a deep discussion of the purpose
and potential of temporary buildings.

The New Architect

83

Human beings have created spaces and built structures since prehistoric times. However, the specialization
and definition of those who build as architects is a modern phenomenon. During medieval times and earlier,
those in charge of building were more anonymously associated with craftsmen or artisans. Only in the modern
era did architecture become differentiated from the work of the craftsman or engineer as a profession in its
own right. This elevation of the architect reached its apogee at the end of the twentieth century with the
rise of the so-called “starchitect.” In the last decade, the profession of architect has
undergone dramatic shifts, due in part to the combination of economic hardship and slowed-down construction
practices with the impossibility of sustaining starchitect aspirations for yet more iconic creations.
Specialists and theorists in the architectural sphere point to a need for a New Architect, a revised role
whereby the architect acts as a social catalyst, community organizer, and facilitator for organizing space
and brokering urban relationships.

Andres Lepik, architecture curator and historian, spoke about the new role of the architect who needs to
act more like a community organizer than a top-down designer in the traditional sense.

Thinkering

84

Thinkering is a combination of the words “tinkering” and “thinking.” It suggests a
mode of thinking that brings together the thought moment with the execution moment, a shift that is
facilitated by technology and rapid prototyping platforms.

Joseph Grima explained that “thinkering” is the idea that, through a mix of tinkering and
thinking, design can reach new levels of functionality and efficiency. In the past, reaching the consumer
with a finished product was the goal. Now, we often see the end user participating in the packaging and
creation of the end product.

Tinkering

85

A tinkerer is someone who enjoys repairing or inventing with machine parts. This act of innovation through
doing and repairing is what tinkering is all about. The word derives from “tinker,” used as
early as the twelfth century to refer to someone who repaired household utensils. It has been widely
appropriated by the maker community.

Making Things Digital engaged visitors in tinkering, an act that gives us the possibility to change our
relationship to machines and electronics, creating a two-way dialogue.

Transformation

86

Active transformation is a state of continual movement, improvement, and change of the urban commons.
Change agents and motivated individuals can trigger moments of transformation and make full system change
possible for cities. The best way to achieve transformation is through “transformation champions,”
individuals who push possible transformation forward by showing successful examples of their own
transformative power.

The Marathon of Transformation gathered together a group of more than fifteen international and
Berlin-based influencers and transformers who presented the ways in which they are actively affecting urban
change.

Trust

87

Effective urban relationships are largely based on notions of trust, rather than systems that rely on
control. While strategies of trust imply uncertainty about the outcomes—which can prove challenging for
some—they are also known to benefit process-driven thinking and experimentation. Trust leads to more
convivial cities in ever more diverse urban contexts.

Field Trips took visitors on biking excursions to meet individuals from various backgrounds and professions
as they told their own personal Berlin stories. For each edition, in an act of trust, Berlin citizens opened
the doors of their homes and businesses, letting Lab visitors in to learn about their way of life.

Upcycling

88

As opposed to recycling, which converts and downgrades used materials, upcycling is the practice of reusing
available materials for new purposes of equal or higher value than that of the object they originally came
from. The term became popular in the mid-1990s when the effectiveness of recycling was being questioned and
a rediscovery of craft and making was taking place. Upcycling gives value to repurposed materials by adding
a design element to the final product and investing it with the “cool” factor that sustainable
items have acquired in recent years. Some argue that upcycling can render a product counterproductive if the
amount of packaging to market it results in the creation of more disposable materials.

Andreas Strauss, artist and designer, explained how, by adding function to everyday items, we can create a
mentality of reuse. Strauss engaged visitors in a workshop to collectively convert a waste receptacle into a
mobile stove. When closed, the object looks like a regular trash bin. When opened, it looks like a gas stove
with surfaces for serving and preparing food.

Urban Beauty

89

Urban beauty is the subjective assessment of the aesthetic values of a city. Some argue that allowing
layers of history and urban decay to be revealed produces the ultimate urban aesthetic. Others prefer new,
pristine developments that are clean, orderly, and employ the newest technology or building techniques. This
multiplicity of perspectives, and the patchwork that the city becomes as a result, is the ultimate
manifestation of urban beauty.

What is Beautiful? featured presentations and a panel discussion about the perception of beauty in cities
by leading academic and professional figures in the fields of aesthetics, architecture, and urban planning
in Berlin. Wolfgang Welsch discussed the subjectivity of beauty as a condition of unique human-centered
vision. He analyzed one of modernity’s key principles—that only from a human perspective can we
understand the world as valuable.

Urban Data

90

Urban data is the information that cities produce, which is measured and turned into facts, figures, and visualizations. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google, the amount of data collected between the dawn of humanity and 2003 is equivalent to the amount we now produce every two days. This phenomenon of massively proliferating data, increasingly referred to as “big data,” comes with the task of filtering and making accessible this new wealth of information.

Poiesis Fellows Orit Halpern and Nerea Calvillo, together with Poiesis program director Harel Shapira,
delivered a talk about the use of data in Smart Cities.

Urban Fatigue

91

Urban fatigue is a condition common in city dwellers, where city life results in increased anxiety,
fatigue, stress, and overstimulation. Stress produced by the demands of city life is one of the leading
silent epidemics of the modern era, with serious physical and psychological effects.

Body Cartography revealed that, in cities, we often censor our feelings to push against overstimulation
created by overcrowded, loud, densely populated urban situations. The program worked on undoing this
behavior by trying to promote empathy with our physical surroundings.

Urban History

92

Urban history is the branch of history dedicated to the study of cities. Its focus is on the ways cities
originated and how the process of urbanization developed from the time of the first human settlements to the
present. Urban history is of great importance to discussions about the future of cities. No city can know
its future without first analyzing, understand-ing, and accepting its past.

Cold War Center: Checkpoint Charlie sought to observe and analyze the history of one of Berlin’s most
iconic historic locations. The panel of experts discussed the future of Checkpoint Charlie and the need for
a Cold War museum in its location, as well as the benefits or disservices that the theme-park effect can
have on collective urban memory.

Urban Intervention

93

“Urban intervention” refers to activities that disrupt the habitual functioning of a city.
Interventions are typically performed by artists or activists. Ranging from street art and design challenges
to ephemeral gatherings, flash mobs, and celebrations, this type of activity achieves a temporary social
cohesiveness and surprise factor that urban dwellers crave.

Mirko Zardini, Director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), described the CCA’s Actions
project in which they documented and catalogued practical and poetic urban interventions and actions carried
out throughout the world.

Urban Livability

94

“Urban livability” refers to a level of well-being based on various measurable criteria in an urban setting. Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey rates major cities based on various criteria including political and social environment, economic environment, and medical and health considerations, among others.

Colin Ellard, research psychologist and professor at the University of Waterloo, talked about environmental
design as it relates to health and described how our minds and bodies respond to the design of the urban
environment that surrounds us.

Urban Microhistories

95

Urban microhistories are individual or collective stories that often go unnoticed in large cities.
Microhistories distance themselves from the official narrative of a city and focus instead on the importance
of smaller, valuable experiences that create the true fabric of city narratives. Urban microhistories offer
a powerful portrait of the city that preserves cultural difference and personal voices.

The Lab placed a high value on the exploration of Berlin microhistories. Two programs in particular
explored hidden narratives that took visitors on unusual city explorations: Field Trips took visitors on
biking excursions to meet individuals from different backgrounds and professions as they told their own
personal Berlin stories. Another program organized a visit to the home and studio of Ekkehard Maaß, German
Democratic Republic (GDR) civil rights activist and musician. Maaß gave an introduction to his art salon
where—behind the Iron Curtain—GDR artists and dissidents secretly met.

Urban Mobility

96

“Urban mobility” refers to the ability to get oneself from point A to point B in an urban
environment. The options for city transport are varied, and include walking, biking, and other forms of
privately or publicly operated transportation. Expanding populations, urban sprawl, and the dangerous
effects of carbon dioxide are all issues to consider when addressing the challenges and opportunities
related to urban mobility. Encouraging multi-mobility systems that incorporate walking, car sharing, bike
sharing, public transportation networks, and new city design that reduces commuting are examples of
strategies designed to improve urban mobility.

Lab Team member Rachel Smith’s Dynamic Connections Map, developed for the Berlin Lab, is the world’s
first interactive biking map to explore urban mobility through biking. The Dynamic Connections Map rates
different Berlin streets on their amenability for cycling, based on traffic volume, topography, and safety
considerations. Users can identify which streets should have future biking infrastructure, creating a
crowdsourced map of the potential future biking network in Berlin.

Urban Psychology

97

Urban psychology is the study of our environment and how it affects us. Urban psychology studies the effects of cities and urban living on people’s mental health and well-being by addressing a variety of areas such as urban fatigue, stress, overstimulation, fear, anxiety, happiness, and our relationship to space.

At the Lab, most of the programs organized by Lab Team member Corinne Rose were connected to the larger
topic of urban psychology. Notable among these was a talk by renowned psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer about the
power of intuition and Tom Stafford’s lecture on the psychological perception of cities.

Urban Sound

98

“Urban sound” refers to the vast range of sounds that the city produces. From the rhythm of the
steam engine to the drone of the automobile, the sound of our cities has always been a defining
characteristic of urban life. While these sounds have served as creative inspiration for various artists,
from the Futurists to John Cage, they also contribute to overstimulation. Through recent developments in
technology, sound can also be harnessed as a valuable tool for measuring various datasets in the city.

Shintaro Miyazaki led a workshop that made audible the invisible waves through which information travels.
We learned that sound can be a valuable tool in visualizing information, especially ephemeral data
networks.

Urban Ugliness

99

Like urban beauty, urban ugliness is the subjective assessment of the aesthetic values of a city. Some
argue that allowing layers of history and urban decay to be revealed produces the ultimate urban aesthetic.
Others prefer new, pristine developments that are clean, orderly, and employ the newest technology or
building techniques.

As a part of the What is Beautiful? Panel, Jürgen Krusche, Institut für Gegenwartskunst, Zürcher Hochschule
der Künste, gave a presentation where he analyzed the locally well-known statement, “Berlin is ugly
and it is good.” Krusche described the value of the ugly in the discourse about urban development and
the need for complexity in cities to make them more functional.

Vacant Space

100

Vacant space is land that has temporarily fallen out of use. In cities, vacant lots provide opportunities
for spontaneous urban interventions, public gathering, and leisure, but can also become determining factors
in the city’s economic well-being. If not managed correctly by city governments, an abundance of empty
lots can lead to urban speculation and safety issues.

At the Marathon of Transformation, Gap Filler presented a variety of urban projects that made temporary use
of vacant spaces in New Zealand after the Christchurch earthquake. They explained how short urban
experiments provide an opportunity for citizens to test long-term solutions.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab Berlin

101

After opening in New York in the summer of 2011, the BMW Guggenheim Lab traveled to Berlin. Over the course of
thirty-three days, the Berlin Lab offered free programs, including workshops, screenings, and tours, and implemented
urban projects in Berlin neighborhoods and online—all centered on “doing and making” to activate urban
change. All programs at the Berlin Lab were developed around four main topics: Empowerment Technologies, Dynamic
Connections, Perception and Urban Micro Lens, and the Senseable City.

As part of the culmination of the Lab’s experience in Berlin, this glossary aims to identify 100 of the most
talked-about trends in urban thinking that played a role during the Lab’s first European venue. These terms and
their definitions aim to document and take the “temperature” of a particular time and place —Berlin in
the summer of 2012— and to understand what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what cities were,
are, and can be. Each definition concludes with an example of a Berlin Lab program that illustrated the relevance and
context of each term.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. One hundred of them,
discussed at the Berlin Lab, follow.

Berlin

102

The BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in Berlin from June 15, 2012 through July 29, 2012.

74th Amendment

1

The 74th Amendment of the Indian constitution was passed in 1992 in an effort to encourage decentralization
of government and to improve the effectiveness of urban governance and planning. It grants municipalities more
power on the local level than they had previously held, and specifies the structures that will facilitate
governance and decision-making, such as ward committees and district-planning committees.

Speakers at various sessions of the Lab’s Meet in the Middle series frequently mentioned the amendment.
During Participatory Planning, several panelists pointed to it as a significantly underutilized tool in
citizen empowerment.

10,000 Honks

2

Originally conceived as safety devices, vehicle horns have become a top concern relating to sound pollution
in cities. Honking regulations appeared as soon as the first vehicles with manual bulb horns were introduced.
Today, honking is illegal in most cities around the world. However, enforcing anti-honking rules has proven an
almost impossible task. New York’s Department of Transportation decided to begin removing “no
honking” signs in January 2013, a measure that was seen as a reflection of the signs’
ineffectiveness. In Mumbai, honking is ubiquitous, a cultural lingo used at all hours, day and night. Honking
is often a substitute for the turn signal and serves as an all-purpose form of communication for drivers. Even
when they have no apparent reason to do so, Mumbaikar drivers honk. In 2008, taxi drivers in Mumbai took an
oath not to honk; the pledge had little to no effect.

In December 2012, celebrity cricket player Sachin Tendulkar visited the Mumbai Lab, and in a conversation
about the city’s issues, he suggested a 10,000-honk rule that would allot every car only 10,000 honks
after the time of its purchase; the regulation would control sound pollution in Mumbai’s streets and
roads, and could fund urban noise-reduction projects: drivers who needed to use more than 10,000 honks would
have to purchase them from the government.

Abuse Intervention

3

It is unfortunately common that violent or abusive acts occur in urban areas while witnesses stand by and
fail to intervene. In metropolitan public spaces, this is known as the “bystander effect,” in
which the likelihood of an individual intervening in a violent or emergency situation decreases as the number
of other witnesses increases. In the home or in social settings, bystanders may not respond because of social
boundaries, psychological shock, or a fear of repercussions.

The interactive performance Being Brave: Privacy and the World Around You used improvisational theater to
discuss how we can and should intervene in situations of abuse, and change our behavior relating to
violence.

Accessibility

4

“Accessibility” describes the ease with which something can be reached, obtained, used, or
understood by as many people as possible. Though often used in reference to accessibility design—urban design
that takes into account the full spectrum of other-abled (including elderly, disabled, and handicapped)
individuals by creating a user-friendly urban and domestic environment—“accessibility” can also
refer to a citizen’s ability to obtain basic services such as health care, education, employment, or
information, or to participate in political or cultural activities.

Accessibility is a major concern for many Mumbaikars, especially the poor. The issue relates to the great
distance one has to walk to get to the water supply; public spaces that are unsafe for women; and the
government‘s lack of transparency. In Split City Mumbai, the first session of the Meet in the Middle
series, the discussion largely focused on public space as the key issue to address in equalizing access for
all.

Advanced Locality Management (ALM)

5

An Advanced Locality Management (ALM) group is a type of official residents’ association that became
formally recognized by the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) in 1997. Originally formed by
residents of Joshi Lane, a northeastern suburb of Mumbai, in an effort to tackle issues of waste management
and collection, ALMs have since spread throughout the city and have expanded their scope to include other
small-scale, non-emergency issues such as road repair, tree planting, and neighborhood beautification. Though
ALMs are primarily confined to middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, local residents created the first
slum-based ALM in 2012.

Seema Redkar, advanced locality management officer for the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, attended
the Lab’s Meet in the Middle session on participatory planning. She discussed how ALMs could be better
utilized in the city, and advocated for them to be more effectively integrated into the planning system.

Affordable Communities

6

Conversations about the importance and necessity of affordable housing are happening in cities around the
world. However, affordable housing plans often do not account for the fact that an affordable lifestyle
depends on other factors related to housing: access to a vast range of other products and services at a low
price point and community relationships that help bring down the cost of day-to-day life. Affordable
communities are those that offer a holistically affordable lifestyle by actively enabling such services and
relationships to prosper within close proximity of affordable housing.

During a vibrant debate in the Meet in the Middle session Mediating Public-Private Housing, it was noted that
the current slum typology enables affordable communities to flourish naturally. Rather than just focusing on
housing, conversations about new affordable housing solutions in Mumbai should be framed around affordable
communities to ensure the practical sustainability of affordability-related housing initiatives.

Analog Bureaucracy

7

Bureaucracy generally refers to the infrastructure and set of administrative policies that govern public
bodies. Citizens often view bureaucratic procedures and structures as impersonal, distant, and cumbersome. In
the early 1900s, the German sociologist and political economist Max Weber used the notion of bureaucracy to
explain the division of labor, and he praised its benefits and the way that it fostered specialization that
increased efficiency. The rise of technology has reduced the amount of bureaucratic paperwork in some cities,
particularly in the West. In cities like Mumbai that rely on older models of administration and information
processing, an analog bureaucracy based mainly on the use of paper continues to be prevalent, meaning that
everyday transactions can sometimes move slowly.

After six weeks of looking at specific areas of Mumbai through the Meet in the Middle series, select
participants from previous discussions returned to the Lab to frame a manifesto for Mumbai advocating for
greater communication and less bureaucratic obstruction in the ways city groups and agencies function.

Architectural Restoration

8

Architectural restoration is the process of bringing back dated, damaged, worn, or structurally unsound
pieces of the built environment to their original state and improving their condition. This includes the
restoration of buildings, districts, waterfronts, and pavements. Although a seemingly outmoded term,
architectural restoration is at the forefront of modern-day urban-renewal efforts and is often a more
economical, sustainable, and efficient approach to redeveloping parts of the city than the comprehensive
demolition and rebuilding of structures.

Planning in a Dynamic City brought together stakeholders from all levels to speak about the city’s
future urban plans, and the possibilities of architectural restoration as an approach to confronting some of
the city’s issues.

Aspiration

9

In a social context, “aspiration” refers to the desire to achieve the wealth, social status, and
material possessions that some people want, but very few actually obtain. Aspirational role models may inspire
some to work hard and to be ambitious in the effort to achieve success. In some places with marked
socioeconomic differences, including Mumbai, such role models play an important role. While some societies
negatively perceive those who achieve social success and amass wealth and material goods, other cultures view
such figures as the epitome of achievement.

Children from the poorer sections of Mumbai face a variety of daily struggles and hardships. At the event
Creating the City for Our Children, a group of disadvantaged children shared their feelings with other, more
well-off children and adults, expressing optimism and deep aspirations for themselves in their ideal future
city.

Auto Rickshaw

10

An auto rickshaw is a vehicle commonly used in developing countries as a form of public transport. These
motorized rickshaws provide city dwellers with cheap and efficient transportation. Typically three-wheeled and
having no doors, these vehicles for hire are motorized versions of traditional cycle rickshaws or pulled
rickshaws and are characterized by a small, covered cabin for the driver and passengers. Due to the intense
traffic congestion in the city and their ability to maneuver more adeptly than cars through traffic, auto
rickshaws (known as “autos” in Mumbai) are essential modes of transport for Mumbaikars. Autos are
both beloved and hated in the city—they are seen as unsafe, yet are also considered efficient and more
environmentally friendly, since new autos run on natural gas.

During An Auto-Taxi Discussion, participants examined central issues about the role of motorized rickshaws in
Mumbai, such as the regulation of metered fares and the necessity for autos as a means of conveying passengers
from public transport hubs to homes.

Bollywood

11

Bollywood is the informal name for the popular Hindi mainstream film industry based primarily in Mumbai—and
an allusion to its American counterpart, Hollywood. The B in the
name is derived from the city’s former name, Bombay. Bollywood produces twice as many films per year as
Hollywood, and with an average daily audience of fourteen million, it is the largest film industry in the
world, second only to Hollywood in terms of overall revenue. Bollywood films are typically characterized by
melodramatic plotlines, love stories, and elaborate song-and-dance numbers.

Through its portrayal of Mumbai on the silver screen, Bollywood has greatly influenced the psyche and
self-image of the city, especially regarding the experience of public space. But its depiction of the city is
often far from realistic. A Lab event showcased a series of independent films about Mumbai, investigating the
alternative, less sanitized version of the city and its public-private tensions. A group of Bollywood artists
responsible for crafting the iconic, though rapidly disappearing hand-painted Bollywood billboard
advertisements also gave a hands-on workshop at the Lab’s Mahim Beach location.

Bottom-Up Urban Engagement

12

Bottom-up urban engagement places the citizen at the root of urban change. The term “bottom-up”
first appeared in relation to its opposite, “top-down,” in the 1942 edition of Harvard University’s
Quarterly Journal of Economics: “In the long run it is part
of the larger question of whether ‘bottom-up’ control can be as efficient as ‘top-down’
control.” In an urban context, this approach has two key, complementary dimensions: first, a trend that
encourages social, cooperative models of city organization; second, a growing interest from government
officials, academia, and the professional sector in resorting to digital, open-sourced data and models as key
resources for understanding urban interactions.

In the face of enormous challenges, Mumbaikars are masters of DIY problem-solving; bottom-up solutions abound
in the city. However, these measures are not enough to address the large-scale challenges of water,
sanitation, transportation, and other essential needs that rely on extensive infrastructure. The ten-part
discussion series, Meet in the Middle, brought together public and private stakeholders—ranging from
grassroots thinkers to city officials—to discover how they can work together and how top-down and bottom-up
planning solutions can complement each other.

Bridging Infrastructure

13

As in many cities in the developing world, much of Mumbai’s urban fabric has taken shape without
formal, comprehensive master planning. Formal systems such as water, sanitation, transportation, and housing
have often been developed in isolation from one another, and generally bypass the informally developed
sections of the city—the slums—where the majority of the population lives. Bridging infrastructure suggests a
need to better connect and align those formal systems to allow them to work efficiently with one another, and
to bridge the gap between formally and informally developed sections of the city.

During Heart of Mumbai Workshop: Bridging the Infrastructure, consensus emerged that bridging infrastructure,
like other public works projects, must be seen as a social investment for the city—not merely a financial
one.

Bus Rapid Transit

14

Bus rapid transit is a system of public transportation that assigns buses to dedicated lanes to provide
high-speed mass transit. Because they do not require as much financial investment in infrastructure as other
forms of high-speed transit, such as subways or light rail, bus rapid transit systems are often viewed as a
relatively cost-effective mass-transit option that can be easily and quickly integrated into a city’s
existing road system.

Mumbai’s public transit system—with buses continually caught in congestion, and a train system
operating at crippling over-capacity—is in desperate need of new infrastructure. There was strong consensus
among panelists in the Mediating Public-Private Transportation talk that bus rapid transit is an essential
solution to Mumbai’s transit problems.

Centralized Urban Platform

15

A centralized urban platform is a system that collects and organizes city data from a wide variety of sources
to allow various types of data to be streamlined, accessed, and integrated into city planning processes. With
so much data being produced about cities today, whether by NGOs, private crowdsourcing initiatives, or mobile
applications, city governments have the potential to gather more in-depth knowledge than ever before about the
on-the-ground reality of how their cities are functioning. A centralized urban platform enables designers to
be better informed, and helps make city governments and planners more agile and responsive to the city’s
needs.

Due to Mumbai’s relatively low levels of formal, government-collected data, and the large number of
grassroots organizations collecting and crowdsourcing data, the digital strategist Sam Lockwood stressed the
need for, and the great utility of, a centralized urban platform for Mumbai during Meet in the Middle’s
Planning in a Dynamic City panel.

Chawls

16

A form of architecture unique to Mumbai, chawls were built in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century in an effort to house the thousands of new migrants arriving in
the city to work in its booming industrial sector—most notably, its cotton textile mills. A typical chawl
consists of a long corridor attaching many small, one- or two-room units, with shared toilets on each floor.
The rooms may house many people at one time.

In “Girnichi Chav”—A Taste of the Mills!, visitors learned about the remarkable and vibrant
system of food distribution and the unique fusion cuisine that emerged in the chawls in the wake of women’s job losses at the mills. Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Angers Albert Pinto?), shown as part of the Lab’s film
series, depicted life and aspiration in the chawl community. Both events took place at the Lab’s
Batliboy Compound satellite location, a former mill workers’ colony surrounded by chawls.

Children Engagement

17

Not simply a reference to education, “children engagement” refers to the importance of actively
challenging children at an early age to think about their city as a place that shapes them, and that they, in
turn, can shape. Children engagement can occur through fun, participatory activities that may not necessarily
speak directly to city issues, but that spark curiosity and generate awareness in the city’s
youngsters—its next generation of citizens—about their city and its future.

The Lab held a multitude of programs that asked children in Mumbai to consider and envision the city’s
future, that examined urban ideas and innovations in a fun and thoughtful way, and that used sports and
special events as a means of beginning the conversation about cities. In creative, hands-on activities, Mumbai’s
youth expressed their artistic visions and their imaginings of the future urban landscape.

Citizen Empowerment

18

Citizen empowerment is the state of feeling that one’s actions actively contribute to urban
decision-making processes and change. By creating opportunities for communication and participation, citizens
feel empowered to contribute their time, energy, and ideas in the city.

Meet in the Middle’s Participatory ­Planning panel explored new forms of citizen engagement that
would be appropriate in Mumbai.

City Apps

19

The proliferation of mobile apps in recent years has had an impact on the urban realm: enterprising
developers have created a variety of apps devoted to better understanding, navigating, and maximizing city
resources. These city apps usually make use of open-source data and are a valuable civic tool. They often
utilize mapping and GPS technologies and can address a variety of urban needs relating to transportation,
municipal requests, tracking city developments, or rating municipal services.

Mediating Public-Private Transportation brought together a panel of experts who examined the concept of the
city app as it could be used for public transportation contexts. One potential app would allow users to track
and see when the next vehicle would arrive and depart.

City Mythology

20

City mythology is the weaving together of mythological places that appear in folklore and religious texts
with real, physical urban spaces. Often, such spaces are protected from construction and development. City
mythology can play an important role in creating a sense of unity, pride, and cohesion among urban dwellers in
a city, as well as in fostering a type of imagined historical memory.

The Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces project asked Lab visitors to consider where they find privacy in public
spaces in Mumbai. A few responses included Mumbai’s peaceful Banganga Tank, a man-made water tank whose
water, according to local legend, comes from the holy—and far-away—Ganges River.

Class

21

“Class,” short for “social class,” is a term drawn from social science and political theory that has different resonances based on its contextual meaning. Generally, it is a concept that organizes society into a socially stratified hierarchy most commonly characterized by three categories: lower, middle, and upper. These distinctions are made based on socioeconomic, cultural, hereditary, and educational factors, among others. Class categorizations can be used as unifying or divisive tools that can create social unrest and spur activism. Class can greatly define who you are and where you can go (physically and socially) and can be seen as a means of keeping the upper classes in power, while preventing those in the lower classes from attaining it.

The Bridging Program series brought together people with similar interests and varying backgrounds from the
formal and informal sectors to interact with each other through playful workshops and games. These
interactions enabled participants to experience how those of different classes and educational backgrounds can
learn and share knowledge with each other.

Community Garden

22

As shared spaces, community gardens offer the possibility of outdoor space in urban areas to those who wouldn’t otherwise have access to green spaces; they can also provide a certain measure of independence for city dwellers who are able to grow their own food. The gardens produce a feeling of ownership and care for a collectively owned piece of land.

During Fooducate, community members worked together to build a community garden in Sambhaji Park.

Complaint

23

Complaining is the act of voicing one’s personal concerns or grievances in a public space. The First
Amendment of the United States Constitution defines the right of people to peacefully assemble and petition,
and in London, Speakers’ Corner, located in Hyde Park, is one place where people are free to voice their
opinions. A more recent development in the United States is the use of “free speech zones,” a
tactic the Bush administration employed to isolate protestors by offering temporary and physically constrained
areas of protest.

During Participatory Planning, it became evident that barrier-free communication with the government is
essentially non-existent in Mumbai. The city has few areas set aside for people to voice opinions, and
citizens are in desperate need of a way to communicate their problems to the governmental bodies that should
address them. Chetan Temkar, founder of the app developer Smart Shehar, discussed an app he is creating to
kick-start this process. The app is intended to have much the same effect as SeeClickFix, a digital mechanism
for reporting urban issues that is now used in some Western countries.

Congestion

24

Congestion on the roads occurs when the volume of traffic has surpassed a road’s capacity to allow
vehicles to move smoothly. Congestion can be attributed to a few primary causes, including saturation of
vehicles on a road, traffic accidents, road work, and weather conditions. Rapid population growth in cities
and insufficient or poor infrastructural planning to accommodate citizens’ need to move efficiently
through the city make it imperative that city governments determine how to effectively combat congestion.
Initiatives to do so have included large infrastructural projects to improve transportation flow; the
development of an accessible, efficient, and comprehensive public transportation system; and incentives to
deter the use of private transportation.

Measures to address Mumbai’s congestion were examined in Mediating Public-Private Transportation, a
panel discussion focused on public transportation and exploring new ideas for efficiently moving Mumbaikars
around the city.

Corruption

25

Political corruption is the abuse of power by government officials for special interests and/or personal
gain. Corruption is manifested in many forms, including bribery, embezzlement, and extortion, and may
facilitate various criminal ventures. To qualify as corruption, the illegal act must be directly related to
official duties. Activities that constitute corruption vary by country or jurisdiction, so an act may be
deemed corrupt in one place but not in another. Political corruption has the power to permeate cities on all
levels and is particularly dangerous when it turns into a culturally accepted practice. Dealing with
corruption not only requires effective institutions and credible leaders, but also political action and shared
responsibility.

The film Invoking Justice examined the corrupt system in Southern
India that continues to use religion to justify violence toward women.

Credit for the Undocumented

26

Citizens working in the informal economy generally have no documentation to prove their level of income or
their employment status. This often prevents these workers from obtaining traditional credit options such as
loans, lines of credit, or mortgages, and from buying a home or starting a business. “Credit for the
undocumented” is the term used to describe a number of systems that are emerging to fill this niche that
offer alternative credit opportunities to informal workers, particularly in developing countries with high
levels of off-the-books economic activity.

Crowdsourcing

27

Crowdsourcing is a problem-solving model that relies on the voluntary sharing of information or skills with
others—a public group, a corporation, or other audiences. Often relying on the Internet as its platform,
crowdsourcing allows for collaboration and participation between a variety of people from different
backgrounds and levels of expertise. The term was coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe, in an article for Wired.

Chetan Temkar, founder of the app developer Smart Shehar, presented projects that are crowdsourcing transit
usage data and information for the company’s transportation apps. The data for the apps is not available
from the city, and since mobile phones are used more widely in Mumbai than personal computers, they are an
ideal platform for crowdsourced information.

Density

28

In cities, “density” refers to human population density, which is the number of people per unit
of area. The world’s most densely populated cities are those with a small land area and a high level of
urbanization. High-density cities are often confronted with the challenge of maintaining a reasonable quality
of housing, infrastructure, and access to resources for their residents.

Mumbai’s growing population and rising density remained at the forefront of conversations during the
Meet in the Middle program series, which brought together public and private stakeholders to address how to
accommodate and better fulfill the needs of Mumbai’s citizens in future city development plans.

Development Incentives

29

Development incentives are benefits that governments offer to developers in order to attract them to build
certain types of infrastructure, or focus their development in a certain location. These benefits can
include—but are not limited to—tax cuts, reduced land prices, or strategic exemption from standard zoning
regulations. Development incentives are often offered when there is a need for a particular kind of
infrastructure that is not within the city government’s mandate to build, such as market housing
(residences that are sold or rented at market value); when the government does not have the financial capacity
to build a certain type of infrastructure, such as affordable housing; or when the government is trying to
encourage the expansion into, or revival of, a certain area of the city.

During the Planning in a Dynamic City session, participants debated whether the government should be offering
better incentives to developers in order to tackle prominent infrastructure and housing issues, or whether the
government should take on more of the responsibility itself. Uma Adusumilli, the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional
Development Authority’s chief planner, advocated for the latter.

Diversity

30

Diversity reflects the degree to which a singular entity is composed of different elements. A diverse city is
one where a variety of people (e.g., of race, ethnicity, class, background, profession, culture, religion,
age, etc.) live within its boundaries. Diversity in cities can create friction, leading to disputes between
groups of people with different backgrounds, and it can also act as a catalyst for varying perspectives to
coalesce into new and hybrid ideas and innovations. Diverse cities can foster open-mindedness, awareness, and
mutual respect and understanding for neighbors and fellow citizens of different cultures or backgrounds.

The Lab’s programs embraced the diversity of city residents through initiatives that welcomed visitors
of various ages, cultures, religions, genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in
events, collectively sharing and celebrating the city’s vibrant life.

Dynamic Cities

31

Dynamic cities are those that have evolved, or are evolving, faster than any formal planning vision that has
been made for them. This phenomenon leads to high levels of informal physical and economic development of the
city, and often a certain lack of properly functioning systems and institutions. The result is that citizens
are often forced to improvise systems and solutions for themselves, creating a city in a permanent state of
physical, social, and economic flux.

Mumbai is certainly one such dynamic city. Planning in a Dynamic City brought together experts from a variety
of fields to discuss how the city’s planning should function to best reflect that reality and be
adaptable to it.

Emerging Middle Class

32

While the exact definition of “middle class” differs among various international institutions and
organizations, it generally refers to a group of people who, relative to others within their society, are
neither poor, nor rich, and who earn sufficient income to support a comfortable lifestyle. This may encompass
stable housing, education, health care, job security, retirement opportunities, and some discretionary income.
This segment of the population is typically associated with high levels of consumerism. The “emerging
middle class” refers to a growing number of people—particularly in developing Asian countries with
rapidly growing economies—who are currently moving out of poverty and causing mass shifts in consumer and
land-development patterns, particularly in relation to housing and transportation (due to increased automobile
ownership).

India’s large emerging middle class is causing enormous shifts in the country’s housing needs and
market. During Mediating Public-Private Housing, Vishnu Swaminathan, director of Ashoka India’s Housing
for All program, spoke about the organization’s purely market-based model of providing affordable
housing to the emerging middle class. Though the organization operates in many cities throughout India,
staggeringly high land prices have kept it from working in Mumbai so far.

Encroachment

33

Encroachment—the advancement of something beyond accepted or comfortable limits—can take on many forms in an
urban context. The physical permanence of those forms varies. For example, in Mumbai, illegal hawkers who do
not hold a license to sell goods in highly trafficked public places such as busy roads and transport hubs
would be described as encroachers upon public space, blocking roads and footpaths, and are typically removed
by authorities. But encroachment can also take the form of unauthorized construction of homes and commercial
establishments. Urban dwellers who illegally live in homes or work from establishments built on public
property can be evicted; the structures are often demolished. Individuals who are part of rising populations
and migrant influxes in cities unable to absorb the population flow often resort to the construction of these
structures. Many countries have state and municipal laws regulating encroachment. In some cities where illegal
encroachment is a particularly pressing problem there are city departments and anti-encroachment squads
dedicated to the task of removing them.

The 1985 documentary, Bombay: Our City, screened at the Lab,
shined a light on the still salient issue of illegal housing on public land in Mumbai.

Fake Suburbia

34

Suburban sprawl has generated a proliferation of suburbs around many of the world’s largest cities.
However, despite the inherently urban quality of these new areas of growth in neighborhoods outside of city
centers, we continue to refer to them as “the suburbs.” This has led to the emergence of a fake
suburbia, in the sense that these peripheral areas might geographically qualify as suburbs, but otherwise
look, feel, and function like an urban center. For instance, the Mumbai Suburban District—which extends from
Bandra to Dahisar, from Kurla (Chuna Bhatti) to Mulund, and from Kurla up to Trombay Creek, and is the largest
district in India in terms of population—does not differ in landscape from the urban fabric of central Mumbai,
but is under a different district authority.

The Planning in a Dynamic City program took into account the Mumbai Municipal Corporation’s work toward
framing its twenty-year development plan in 2014, taking into account planning for Mumbai’s “suburbs.”

Feel-Good Urbanism

35

“Feel-good urbanism” refers to the ubiquitous presence of certain frequently used terms that
describe positive, politically correct practices in urban spaces and architecture. Through mere repetition and
the trendiness that these terms have acquired, many have become the go-to adjectives when defining
contemporary urban projects. Some examples of these overused feel-good urban adjectives include “green,”
“sustainable,” and “LEED-certified.”

Feel-good urbanism terms are often used in the context of architectural competitions. Design Challenge
brought together architecture students and a slum contractor to share their knowledge about design and
construction as they submitted proposals for the construction of slum dwellings.

Flash Mob

36

A flash mob is a seemingly impromptu assembly of people who gather in a public space to perform a fleeting
act—generally fun, pointless, entertaining, or artistic—and then disperse. Harper’s editor Bill Wasik organized the first flash mobs in
Manhattan in 2003, and the term was coined shortly therafter. Today, flash mobs are commonly organized and
coordinated through social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, and can involve just a few people or
hundreds.

The Lab organized its own version of flash mobs. On a weekly basis, the Lab’s Mobile Lab Units went out
to the initiative’s designated satellite locations to engage with the city’s residents, heighten
awareness of the Lab’s presence, share its message of “ME=WE,” and welcome onlookers to
participate in lighthearted and festive flash mob events.

Floor Space Index (FSI)

37

Floor Space Index, also known as Floor Area Ratio (FAR) and Floor Space Ratio (FSR), are terms that describe
the ratio of a building’s total floor area to the area of the land on which it is built. The regulations
pertaining to FSI limit the floor space available for residential and business development, since they dictate
how much floor area a builder can construct on a plot of land, which in turn relates to how high the builder
can make a structure. FSI can be used during the zoning process to limit how much can be built in a certain
area—in order to preserve the skyline—or as a tool that controls bulk development on a plot and across a zone.
In practice, the assessment of FSI can be very complex. Many jurisdictions have rules defining what counts as
allowable gross floor area, as well as rules about what can be assessed as the permissible area of the
plot.

In Mediating Public-Private Housing, participants discussed the pressing issue relating to the lack of
affordable housing for Mumbai’s citizens and the impact that the city’s historically low FSI has
on residential and city development.

Food Distribution

38

“Food distribution” refers to the broad range of services through which food travels from the
producer to the consumer. These services can include, but are not limited to, food-transportation systems,
wholesalers, farmers’ markets, shops, supermarkets, street food purveyors, and restaurants. The
geographic distribution of these services within a city determines citizens’ access to certain types of
food. Areas with a severe lack of food-distribution services are known as “food deserts.”

In Food Bazaar, a panel discussion during the Food for Thought series, the speakers examined issues relating
to food distribution in Mumbai, and the link between India’s rural and urban areas.

Food Education

39

Food education is the sharing of knowledge to increase awareness and understanding of topics related to food,
including nutrition, food systems, food safety, and food production, among others. Food education is
imperative in a healthy, sustainable society and has the potential to change the way people make food
choices—from purchase to preparation to consumption. Food education often motivates people to stand up for
their right to better-quality foods and allows people to be more aware of how their choices affect food
systems.

In the Food Bazaar program, panelists discussed the lack of food education in Mumbai, which was one of the
reasons for the cost increase and over-fishing of a particular species of fish in comparison to those of
another abundant, similar, and local species.

Gated Community

40

A gated community is a residential development that is excluded by a wall or fence from the surrounding area.
Within the confines of a gated community, residents can make use of a variety of amenities, including sports
facilities, spas, childcare, and independent sanitation or power infrastructure. These residential compounds
are often designed by a single developer and therefore display a high level of formal uniformity among the
housing units. To ensure the security of residents, gated communities are often closely patrolled by private
security companies and kept under video surveillance. Furthermore, the cost of living in a gated community is
usually high. For these reasons, some have argued that gated housing compounds create antagonism and division
in the larger communities where they are created.

Mediating Public-Private Housing explored the inequalities in Mumbai’s housing, which has some of the
world’s most expensive homes and at the same time the largest expanse of informal settlements.

Green Space

41

In an urban context, “green space” refers to an open space with natural vegetation such as grass,
trees, bushes, flowers, and other plants. Urban green spaces can include parks, greenways, nature paths,
gardens, and waterfronts. Green spaces provide ecological functions for cities—carbon sequestration, water
purification, and cooling—and also allow people to interact with nature, which has been proven essential to
mental and physical human health. Thus, plentiful public green spaces are a critical feature of good urban
design.

During the workshop Pop-up Garden, women explored and prototyped ideas for a green space, open only to women,
that will be built in Mumbai’s Santa Cruz neighborhood.

Hawker

42

A hawker is a street vendor who sells merchandise or food in a public space— usually on the sidewalk, road,
or in public squares—in such a way that his or her goods and/or equipment can be easily transported.

Mumbai’s urban dialogue is peppered with ongoing debates about whether or not hawkers should be allowed
on the city’s streets and sidewalks. Some see hawkers as menaces to walkability who steal space from the
already crowded sidewalks. Others consider them a vital part of a complex social and economic system. This
debate emerged many times at the Lab, particularly during discussions relating to sidewalks, in the sessions
Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks and Mediating Public-Private Transportation.

Homegrown Housing

43

Homegrown housing refers to the ability of a neighborhood to build its own affordable-housing stock. The
development of this type of housing takes place primarily in slum neighborhoods and is typically completed by
a complex network of local, small-scale contractors, builders, and other related professionals. These
professionals are usually informally educated in their fields, but possess specific knowledge about building
in the context of the existing neighborhood, and about producing high-quality, community-appropriate housing
at a relatively low price point.

In Mediating Public-Private Housing, representatives of the Mumbai-based research organization URBZ discussed
their work documenting the often overlooked merits of homegrown housing, and advocated for homegrown models to
be integrated with formal, affordable housing efforts.

Inclusive Citizenship

44

The concept of the citizen goes back to the city-states of ancient Greece and refers to the rights,
privileges, and responsibilities of a city dweller. Inclusive citizenship refers to the need for all urban
dwellers to be treated and considered as full-status citizens, regardless of their socioeconomic background or
living conditions. In describing a situation in which all citizens are given equal treatment, inclusive
citizenship evokes the goal of unity among all who belong to a city.

In the Meet in the Middle panel Participatory Planning, Himanshu Burte, an architect/researcher from the Tata
Institute of Social Sciences, discussed how the concept of “the public” needs to be properly
defined in a city where the majority of people live and work in informal settlements and sectors. Citizenship,
he emphasized, needs to be completely inclusive for all.

Incremental Development

45

“Incremental development” refers to a process of gradually changing or upgrading the physical
fabric of a city district or neighborhood. In contrast to large-scale redesigns, incremental development
typically maintains the overall structure or typology of the district, and can help ease the disruption of
social structure that sudden large-scale redevelopment may cause.

In Mediating Public-Private Housing, participants pointed to examples of successful incremental
development—such as initiatives in Tokyo—that could provide lessons for Mumbai. The panelists, who noted the
failure of most government slum redevelopment schemes where slums were razed and residents were moved into
towers, presented models of successful incremental slum upgrading schemes that could present a better
alternative.

Informal Economy

46

An informal economy refers to a system of economic exchanges and activities that occur without government
regulation or taxation. By operating in the informal sector, both the employee and employer may earn higher
wages or incur lower costs due to the evasion of taxes. However, informal-sector jobs are usually illegal and
often lack the security, safe working conditions, and other benefits that formal-sector employment may ensure.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that half the world’s
workers are employed in the informal sector.

Ninety percent of Mumbai’s workforce is employed in the informal economy. This fact permeates nearly
every aspect of city life and planning, and is at the root of many inequalities. It served as the spark for
discussion at the first Meet in the Middle session, Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity.

Informal Transit Systems

47

Informal transit systems are networks of privately operated transportation carriers that fill gaps left by
official public transit systems. Though sometimes found in the developed world, particularly in large American
cities, informal transit systems are most common in the developing world and tend to serve poorer segments of
society. Popular informal transit modes include bicycle-powered or motorized rickshaws, minibuses, and vans.
These carriers are often unsanctioned by government bodies.

Informal transit systems play a crucial role in Mumbai’s transport sector, filling gaps in both
long-distance mass transit and last-mile connectivity. An Auto-Taxi Discussion brought together stakeholders
from the arena of informal transit to discuss win-win solutions for its improvement.

Infraspace

48

Coined by Mumbai Lab team member Neville Mars, the term “infraspace” refers to the space taken up
by infrastructure in a city, upon or into which other forms of infrastructure can be built or integrated. The
term is intended to prompt designers to reenvision existing infrastructure as viable space for creative
development, so that land use can be maximized, especially in hyper-dense urban environments.

The Mumbai Lab’s Landlink Design Prototype proposed a creative use of infraspace—to transform a set of
enormous soon-to-be defunct steel pipes into an auto-rickshaw highway/pedestrian boardwalk and business
district—in an effort to spur discussion about the opportunities such spaces present in Mumbai.

Infrastructure Development

49

Infrastructure development refers to the political process through which city infrastructure is created—and
especially to how it is financed. As city governments around the world become more and more financially
pressured, many are looking for new models for financing infrastructure development, such as public-private
partnerships, density “bonusing,” or other development incentives.

Panelists in Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks criticized the city of Mumbai for taking a “projects
before planning” approach to infrastructure development—an approach to developing infrastructure that
may be inappropriate for the city, but is easily funded—instead of exploring new funding models to build the
infrastructure the city really needs.

Interdependence

50

“Interdependence” refers to a reciprocal relationship in which two or more entities (individuals,
groups, or objects) mutually rely on one another. Every natural, political, social, and economic system exists
within and relies on a vast network of interdependent relationships.

The divide between Mumbai’s formal and informal city—non-slum and slum—is significant, but the worlds
exist in a tightly woven relationship of interdependence, with neither able to function or survive without the
other. In Split City Mumbai: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity, this important relationship was acknowledged, and
that recognition served as an established basis for future Meet in the Middle discussions.

Local Food

51

There is no consensus as to what qualifies food as “local,” but generally speaking the term
refers to food that is produced, processed, and sold all within the same region, or within a short
geographical distance from its point of origin. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act adopted by the US
Congress in 2008 states that food must travel less than 400 miles from its source, or be sold within the state
in which it is produced, to be considered a “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product.”
Though local food still accounts for a small fraction of US agricultural sales, the market is growing rapidly
due to increased demand for fresher produce and consumer desire to support local economies and reduce
environmental impact. City dwellers commonly access local food through farmers’ markets and Community
Supported Agriculture, and increasingly, in conventional grocery stores.

Food is an integral dimension of the multitude of cultures and religions in Mumbai. The discussion We Like it
Spicy explored patterns of food identity throughout the city, and what the occasional clashes between food
cultures reveal about the city’s cultural politics.

Loss of Livelihood

52

Loss of livelihood occurs when an individual or a group of people loses the ability to secure the necessities
of life. Though sometimes equated with job loss, loss of livelihood tends to be associated with a severance
from a deeper connection with one’s means of sustenance, and is often used to describe situations in
which individuals or groups are no longer able to carry out traditional occupations due to the impact of
environmental change or modernization.

In Mumbai, both environmental pollution and over-fishing in the commercial sector put the livelihood of the
Koli fishing community—the original inhabitants of the city—at risk. Maazhi Maach
(Our Fish) celebrated the Koli community’s culture while providing a platform to learn about and discuss
solutions to its struggle.

ME=WE

53

“ME=WE,” a phrase coined by the Mumbai Lab Team, refers to the interconnected and constantly
shifting individual (“me”) and community (“we”) needs that shape city life. Individual
needs, actions, and decisions ultimately affect those of the community, just as the community’s needs,
actions, and decisions affect our own. By examining how citizens negotiate the blurred and regularly
oscillating concepts of the “me” and the “we” in their urban environment, we may be
able to redefine notions of the divide between the individual and community, the private and public, and the
part and the whole, which can inform urban design for the future.

The Mumbai Lab’s programs and projects were all developed with the idea of examining how Mumbai’s
urban dwellers effectively and constantly morphed the notions of the “me” and the “we.”

Megaprojects

54

Megaprojects are exceptionally large-scale investment projects that typically cost more than 1 billion US
dollars. They can include bridges, tunnels, highways, railways, airports, power plants, and public buildings.
These projects typically have a substantial impact on communities, the environment, and government budgets.
Critics have assailed megaprojects for their top-down planning approaches and the way that the communities
most affected by the initiatives are disregarded in the planning process. While not always financially
advantageous, desired by the general public, nor environmentally friendly, megaproject investments have been
used by governments as a tactic to stimulate the economy. Incremental infrastructure development, smaller
interventions, greater transparency, and inclusion of those most affected in the planning and development
process would help to ensure that these municipal projects fulfill the needs of end users and are a long-term
asset to the city as a whole.

In this vein, the Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks session focused on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. This
controversial megaproject has garnered criticism for its massive expense, poor traffic design, and lack of
accessibility and availability to the majority of the city’s residents due to the prohibitive cost of
the sea link’s toll.

Micro-Solutions Commoditization

55

Micro-solutions are small-scale interventions that improve the lives of individuals or small communities and,
in so doing, help contribute to the gradual relief of a large-scale problem. While micro-solutions such as
micro-loans, rural health clinics, or education programs are often initiated by an NGO or the government
sector, micro-solutions commoditization refers to the notion that the private sector can contribute to the
resolution of global issues by creating and marketing products that address problems on a small scale.
Ideally, these products can be bought and sold at a price point affordable to the communities and individuals
who need them.

In Comfortably Sustainable, panelists suggested that micro-solutions commoditization could help address the
needs of individuals while the city is developing large-scale solutions to issues such as water and
sanitation.

Modernization

56

Modernization is the process of putting into place structures and systems that fulfill contemporary needs. In
cities, this can refer to upgrading physical infrastructures such as architecture, roads, or bridges;
replacing sanitation and water systems with more efficient, healthy, and environmentally friendly systems; and
shifting political and bureaucratic processes or social structures. Mumbai is schizophrenic in its degree of
modernization: parts of the city, such as its economic structure and architecture, are modernizing too rapidly
for its citizens, displacing populations and leaving many historic treasures behind. Other aspects of the
city, such as its paper-laden analog bureaucracy, are mired in the past and could benefit from increased
efficiency.

Social modernization in Mumbai is causing enormous shifts in living patterns, and even in psychological
concepts such as privacy. Your Space, My Space, or Our Public Space?: Privacy and Spaces in Mumbai explored
these transformations.

Multi-Way Learning

57

The psychology of learning has established that there are multiple ways for individuals to acquire new
knowledge. Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s analysis suggested that learning styles result from an individual’s
preferred way of adapting based on experience, observation, abstract conceptualization, and active
experimentation. In 1983, developmental psychologist Howard Gardner introduced the concept of
multiple-intelligence theory, a notion that is widely used today, which suggests that each person has a
proficiency for different kinds of intelligence.

All the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s programs focus on different approaches to learning about cities. Serious
urban issues are approached from a variety of perspectives that range from the academic to the playful, all
the while maintaining a keen focus on experimentation and hands-on participation. The programs in the Bridging
series generated an environment for multi-way learning, allowing people with similar interests, yet different
backgrounds, to share knowledge (about football, music, dance, and architecture/construction), interact with
each other, and learn from one another through different methods and techniques.

Mumbai Mills

58

The rapid growth of Mumbai’s economy throughout the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries was
largely due to its cotton textile milling industry. At its peak, the industry employed nearly 250,000 people.
Mill workers typically lived in chawls, an arrangement that allowed
multilayered social and economic networks to form within the mill community. The decline of the industry in
the late 1980s and early 1990s led to massive job losses and factory shutdowns. In the aftermath, the former
mill lands, which covered more than 600 acres in the center of the city, were supposed to be distributed by a
formula in which one-third of the land would be put up for sale for private development while the other
two-thirds would be made into affordable housing and public space. But in 2006, India’s Supreme Court
issued a decision that allowed much of the land to be sold for private development. The redevelopment of the
former mill lands has been and remains the most contested and controversial issue regarding land use in
Mumbai.

One of the Lab’s satellite sites was located directly adjacent to the crumbling mill smokestacks at the
Batliboy Compound, which was once a mill workers’ colony.

Municipal Autonomy

59

Unlike most cities around the world, which have elected mayors who represent the city’s population and
are directly accountable only to them, Mumbai is governed primarily by the government of Maharashtra—the large
state in which it exists—with the chief minister of Maharashtra assigned the greatest governing authority.
This means that no local official elected by the city’s population has the power to make final,
large-scale decisions, and no local entity has the funding to implement large projects. Many commentators and
citizens believe that putting power in the hands of an official responsible for representing the interests of
Mumbaikars only—someone who is held accountable to them during city elections—would allow Mumbai a greater
degree of autonomy from the state government and facilitate more efficient solutions to city problems.

The need for municipal autonomy permeated nearly every Meet in the Middle session discussion. It was clear
that city thinkers and designers in Mumbai feel a great sense of frustration and powerlessness as a result of
the current political structure.

The New Shrinking City

60

Shrinking cities, as defined by sociologist Saskia Sassen, are those that over a relatively short period of
time have suffered from a considerable loss of population, seriously affecting their capacity to continue
existing as urban centers. The idea of the “new shrinking city,” however, seeks to address a new
kind of loss within urban contexts: rather than shrinking population, most cities today are suffering from
over-growth. As citizens become overwhelmed by the vastness of urban areas, we tend to shrink our areas of
action, rather than expand them outward at the speed that the city itself is growing.

The Heart of Mumbai Workshop: Bridging the Infrastructure program touched on the issue of disconnectedness in
the city’s transportation infrastructure, which plays a role in confining Mumbaikars’ movements to
areas that are in close proximity to their homes.

Open Governance

61

“Open governance” refers to citizen access to government information, data, and processes to
enable widespread participation and collaboration in governmental decision-making processes. Often, this
type of engagement harnesses technology to facilitate a more active and open communication between citizens
and government, leading to more efficient use of budgets and improved quality of life for city dwellers. Open
governance has the potential to make urban governments more accountable to their citizens, while enhancing the
legitimacy of those in power.

In Meet in the Middle’s Participatory Planning panel, Himanshu Burte, an architect-researcher from the
Tata Institute of Social Sciences, discussed how planning cannot be considered separate from governance—thus,
participatory planning cannot happen without participatory government. “If we are serious about
participation in planning, we have to be serious about it in governance,” he said, alluding to the
important connections between politics, economics, and development.

Open-Source

62

“Open-source” refers to any software whose code is designed in such a way that the user
participates in the creation of data. The term was originally coined by a group of engineers in 1998 when they
founded the Open Source Initiative. This term is closely related to free software, Copyleft, and Creative
Commons—all ­initiatives that seek to democratize access to information.

In some of the Mumbai Lab’s programs, the term “open-source” was used to describe the reuse
of existing infrastructural city elements. During Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks, Lab Team member Neville
Mars suggested that currently existing skywalks in Mumbai, which are often underutilized, should be treated as
open-source infrastructure and retrofitted by citizens and designers for more community- and place-appropriate
uses.

Ostrich Effect

63

Contrary to popular belief, ostriches do not bury their heads in the ground when threatened. This myth is
thought to have its roots in the accounts of Pliny the Elder, a philosopher and naturalist who lived during
the first century A.D. A description Pliny wrote contributed to the false notion that ostriches cover their
heads and believe that, in doing so, they hide their entire bodies. This body language and the associated
metaphor has come to signify an attitude of denial, which can be used in urban settings when referring to
social interaction among citizens that communicates an indifference to the adverse or harsh conditions of
everyday street life.

Using role-play and open, direct discussion, Being Brave addressed the issue of physical and psychological
violence that afflicts communities in the city. Individuals who suffer such violence often stifle their
reactions with silence due to fear, inconvenience, and shame, among other concerns; similarly, witnesses of
this abuse exhibit characteristics of the ostrich effect and refrain from looking at or acknowledging the
abuse inflicted by others.

Participatory Urbanism

64

Participatory urbanism is the condition, often facilitated by technology, in which citizens are empowered to
collect and contribute data, ideas, and proposals to city decision-makers. The idea is grounded in the fact
that community members are experts on their particular urban situations and contain within them the knowledge
and solutions for any number of issues. Participatory urbanism allows professionals to identify real needs and
tap into local knowledge and human resources rather than implementing change from the top down.

The panelists in Meet in the Middle’s Participatory Planning session discussed how citizens could play
an active, participatory role in planning in Mumbai.

Pet Slum

65

A pet slum is a slum that has become popularized to the degree that it has become a tourist attraction.
Dharavi, one of the largest slums in the world, is an example of a slum that has received so much attention
that tour operators offer “authentic” guided tours through it. Because of this popularity, it has
been featured in Hollywood blockbusters and is often referenced in academic papers. In addition, a majority of
NGOs in the field focus their work in the area instead of other lesser-known slums equally in need of
attention.

Rather than seeing slums as exotic or beautiful—as many pet slums are imagined—the 1985 documentary Bombay: Our City depicts the realities of how slum dwellers struggle to
survive in extremely harsh conditions.

Play Spaces

66

Play spaces are public spaces where people of all ages can engage in physical activity for enjoyment and
recreation rather than for serious or practical purposes. Safe and accessible play spaces are important for
urban residents, promoting good physical health and well-being, and allowing for community-building activities
and an increase in positive interactions between individuals.

A ping-pong table and carrom board were placed at the Lab’s
satellite locations to create a play space for visitors. These recreational games created a platform for
friends and strangers to meet and interact. Also, children who attended the Football with a Kick program
showed excitement not only about the sport of football, but about the opportunity to have the time and a
dedicated space to play.

Postindustrial Economy

67

Mumbai was once famous for its cotton milling, as well as its chemical and other major industries. But during
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city went through a massive process of deindustrialization, as did much of
urban India. This transformation was coupled with a substantial shift toward a service-based economy, which
employs far fewer people and requires workers to have a higher level of general education. The result has been
large job losses in the formal sector and the rapid growth of Mumbai’s informal economy, which currently
employs an estimated 90 percent of the city’s labor force.

During “Girnichi Chav”—A Taste of the Mills!, Lab visitors learned firsthand about the experience
of one group of women who moved from formal mill employment to Mumbai’s famous, and informal, tiffin food production and distribution service sector.

Privacy

68

Privacy is an elusive and emotionally complex concept that even experts still have trouble defining and
interpreting. It has been related to anonymity, silence, seclusion, solitude, and autonomy, but its
definition—and the perception of it—shifts based on context. Individuals seek privacy in different forms and
through diverse methods. Urban dwellers often find privacy in their homes, but due to the limited space in
most residential urban situations, many seek privacy in public spaces.

The Your Place, My Place, or Our Public Space? research project engaged visitors to participate in a study
about the relationship between privacy and interior and exterior spaces in Mumbai by asking questions about
how Mumbaikars perceive privacy, where they find it, and with whom they experience it.

Private-Sector Accountability

69

Private-sector players are becoming increasingly involved in the creation of public infrastructure through
public-private partnerships, or even private ventures. However, they are not held accountable to the public in
the same way that governments are. Without this potential for negative political repercussions, there is less
incentive for private-sector stakeholders to work with the sole benefit of the public in mind. Private-sector
accountability denotes a need to ensure that stakeholders in the private sector are somehow held accountable
to the public.

During Meet in the Middle’s Mediating Public-Private Investment panel, sociologist Saskia Sassen
stressed the importance of creating a private-sector accountability mechanism in Mumbai and other cities that
have extensive private investment in public infrastructure projects.

Privatization

70

Privatization is the transition from public to private ownership, or from government to business or
non-profit status. Privatization can have a dramatic impact on the accessibility, maintenance, and diversity
of services or goods offered in cities. Those against privatization argue that it creates a system of economic
elitism, one in which only those who can pay will benefit. These critics believe that there are fundamental
goods and services that the state should provide to all citizens. Those in favor of privatization believe that
all goods and services can be offered for profit by private businesses and organizations, creating incentive
for those entities to function optimally.

During Comfortably Sustainable, panelists unanimously agreed that the concept of “basic necessities,”
which includes such essentials as water, should be legally defined, and they concurred that these resources
should not be privatized under any circumstances.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPP)

71

Public-private partnerships (PPP) bring together public, governmental entities with private corporations or
institutions to develop a project together or share its funding. A PPP can be a good alternative to projects
or businesses that are solely financed through public funds, particularly during times of economic crisis.
Such arrangements also have the potential to lessen the contribution of taxpayer funds that would be invested
if the project was solely funded by government entities.

Panelists assessed and debated the delicate, yet essential, nature of public-private partnerships and
infrastructure development in Mediating Public-Private Investment, part of the Mumbai Lab’s Meet in the
Middle series.

Public Space

72

A public space is a plot of land that is open and accessible to all people. Though often used to refer to
social spaces used for gathering or recreation, such as plazas or parks, “public space” also
refers to streets, sidewalks, and government buildings that are open to the public and not privately
owned.

The Mumbai Lab’s ongoing visual survey project, Mapping Privacy in Public Spaces, encouraged Mumbaikars
to map the public spaces where they go to find moments of solidarity or privacy.

Public Transit

73

Public transit is a communal passenger transportation service available to the general public. This system of
transportation often encompasses buses, subways, trains, trolleys, and ferries. Most public transit operates
on a scheduled timetable and is typically funded, regulated, and subsidized by the government. Cities are
investing in and expanding public transit services to alleviate economic, energy, and environmental
challenges. Due to rapid urbanization, more urban dwellers living in dense, highly populated cities are
relying heavily on accessible, efficient, and cheap public transit. However, many cities are struggling to
effectively provide adequate service to their growing populations.

Mediating Public-Private Transport sought to find a solution to some of Mumbai’s growing transportation
needs by exploring the opinions of advocates for public transport as well as supporters of private vehicles;
the group discussed how resources can be allocated to benefit both constituencies.

Rainwater Harvesting

74

Rainwater harvesting provides an independent water supply by capturing, diverting, and storing rainwater for
later use. Rainwater harvesting is beneficial, since it reduces demand on the existing water supply and
reduces runoff, erosion, and contamination of surface water. A rainwater harvesting system can range in size
and complexity, but is easy to understand, install, and operate; it generally has negligible operating costs.
The systems have been adopted in many countries to supplement the main water supply.

ME=WE Memorandum, a discussion held at the end of the Meet in the Middle series, introduced innovative new
ideas and prototypes for urban improvement initiatives by Lab Team member Neville Mars. Two of the proposals
included affordable and scalable solutions that would use rainwater harvesting as a means to make a local
freshwater supply available year-round.

Redevelopment

75

Redevelopment introduces architectural and planning changes to an area, often drastically altering it from
its previous state. Redevelopment projects can be small- or large-scale and can include the demolition or
rehabilitation of existing structures. Typically, redevelopment is received with mixed reactions, as it is
often a top-down initiative, prompting resistance in some quarters; yet it is welcomed by other groups, since
such efforts may bring in lucrative profits and revitalize a neighborhood or city. Redevelopment projects
generally involve the displacement of residents or small businesses that are routinely under-compensated and
have little or no power to contest the plan.

The Mediating Public-Private Housing panel discussion considered the citizen’s role in the government’s
slum redevelopment plans and how Mumbai can explore alternative solutions.

Retrofitting Infrastructure

76

Retrofitting infrastructure is the reimag-ining of an existing piece of major organizational
infrastructure (e.g. transportation, water, sewage, and electricity). More than half of the world’s
population now lives in cities, new and old. Although cities are more energy efficient than areas of suburban
sprawl, they still face challenges to sustainable living—mainly due to the fact that the major infrastructure
necessary to provide essential needs for residents and businesses has already been put in place. Rather than
expending additional energy, resources, and funds on demolishing heavy infrastructure to improve city living,
retrofitting infrastructure has become an alternative solution. This approach involves the transformative
reuse of an existing piece of infrastructure into an alternative entity, such as an old train track into a
green pedestrian walkway. These transformations often improve efficiency in existing systems and benefit the
greater public.

In the Landlink Design Prototype, Lab Team member Neville Mars proposed retrofitting the Tansa Pipelines,
which comprise 75 kilometers of massive water-system infrastructure that runs above ground through the city.
Mars suggested the pipelines, now slowly being phased out, could be resurrected as a pedestrian bridge,
thereby improving connections within the city. During Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks, participants suggested
strategies of retrofitting infrastructure as a way of enabling currently existing, yet underutilized skywalks
to better serve the public. One audience member suggested that, in a city greatly lacking open, public green
spaces, skywalks could be retrofitted into public parks like New York’s High Line.

Right to Information (RTI)

77

In 2005, the government of India passed the Right to Information (RTI) Act, which guaranteed Indian citizens
the right to obtain information from the government about the activities of any government body or public
authority owned, controlled, or substantially financed by the government. While the Constitution of India
implicitly grants citizens the right to information, the RTI Act explicitly entrenched the right as it relates
to public institutions, and established a clear system through which citizens should channel their information
requests. Many countries around the world have similar acts. They are now considered a necessary cornerstone
of transparency and democracy.

During Participatory Planning, Shailesh Gandhi, an RTI activist and former information commissioner for the
government of India, advocated that citizens should make better use of the RTI Act and submit an RTI request
every day. At least one-third of those requests would make a small change, he said, which is a good start to
generating a more transparent and accountable government.

Rural Migration

78

Rural migration refers to the movement of populations from rural to urban regions. With industrialization and
globalization, rural migration within and between nations is fueled by rural poverty, loss or degradation of
farmland due to development, pollution, conflict, and natural disasters; it is also caused by unequal economic
development, among other factors. An increasing number of rural migrants have been moving into
cities—especially within developing countries—which has contributed to the exponential population growth in
cities. Rural migrants generally work in labor-intensive jobs, send remittances to family members who remain
in their villages, and live in low-income enclaves or slums due to a shortage of affordable housing. It is not
uncommon for urbanites to impose social stigmas on rural migrants, who are often discriminated against and
marginalized.

The Lab featured a screening of the film Presence (2012), in which
migrant workers in Bangalore recount stories of seeing ghosts, thus revealing forgotten histories and their
own personal narratives.

Sanitation

79

Sanitation—the expedient removal of waste material—is necessary for the health of citizens and the urban
environment alike. Cities are responsible for providing their residents with properly functioning sanitation
systems that include services such as garbage collection, wastewater disposal, and other hygiene-related
activities. An inadequate or dysfunctional sanitation system can result in severe public health problems.

The Comfortably Sustainable session considered how private entities and public organizations could work
together to solve urban problems and deliver such services as sanitation and water in a way that would allow
Mumbai to become more comfortable and sustainable.

Service Economy

80

A service economy is an economic system based on the buying and selling of services. In the last fifty years,
there has been a shift in industrialized economies from manufacturing goods to providing services. High-paying
manufacturing jobs are rapidly disappearing, only to be replaced by low-paying service-sector jobs that
produce no physical product. The service economy in developing countries is growing exponentially and is
mainly concentrated in hospitality, retail, information technology, and human services. Those services that
can be outsourced are often sent to developing countries. Not only does virtually every product today have a
service component to it, but most products are being transformed into services, changing the economic
landscape and dynamics of interchange in cities and around the world.

The protagonist in the film Albert Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon Aata Hai? (What Angers Albert Pinto?), screened at the Mumbai Lab, deals with
daily struggles as a member of the working class in his job in the service economy.

Sharia Law

81

Sharia law is the Islamic code of criminal justice that is based
on the principles of living and ethics that many Muslims accept as part of their faith; the system is
delineated in the Qur’an and by the prophet Mohammed. Sharia law
is practiced in many Muslim countries, and also integrated, in part, into some Western judicial systems. Its
implementation has sparked controversy around the world due to its traditional restriction of the woman’s
role, voice, and rights, as well as the violent nature of its traditional punishments.

As part of the Mumbai Lab’s film series at the Mahim Beach satellite location, the film Invoking Justice was screened. The film documents a group of Muslim
women who live in an area of south India where Sharia law is
practiced. The group created a women’s jamaat (the term for
the traditionally all-male assembly that investigates crimes) to bring greater equality and rights to women
whose cases were being investigated.

Skywalks

82

A skywalk is a type of elevated pedestrian walkway whose purpose is to give pedestrians an efficient means to
move from commercial or transportation hubs to specific destinations. Skywalks give pedestrians a safe
alternative to cross a highly trafficked traffic junction, while simultaneously easing traffic congestion, and
they strategically and efficiently disperse commuters from congested areas. Safety and convenience are the
main reasons for the development of the walkways, but without proper planning, they can be a costly and
underused public investment.

Skywalks have been the subject of heated debate in Mumbai. Pedestrians complain that they are often
inconvenient to use, that they have been built in areas where sizable pedestrian pavements already exist, and
that they are awkwardly designed. Rethinking Sealinks and Skywalks explored the qualitative potential of the
Lab’s proposed network of alternatives.

Slum

83

The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) defines a slum as “a heavily populated
urban area characterized by substandard housing and squalor” where residents lack one or more of the
following: durable housing of a permanent nature that protects against extreme climate conditions; sufficient
living space; easy access to safe water in sufficient amounts at an affordable price; access to adequate
sanitation; and security of tenure that prevents forced evictions. While the term “slum” is
sometimes viewed as pejorative—particularly in academic settings—it typically lacks such a connotation in the
developing world, where most slums exist. Approximately one billion people around the world live in slums of
varying quality. Nearly 60 percent of Mumbai’s population lives in slums. Some areas are formally
recognized with legal tenure, and have been able to develop into higher quality permanent settlements, while
residents in other areas face the threat of eviction every day, and their living conditions remain dismal. The
slums are rarely included in discussions around city visioning, and they are often entirely left out of the
city planning and development process—leaving residents to improvise solutions for their daily
necessities.

In Nukkad Natak, girls from Dharavi, a slum situated in central Mumbai that is considered Asia’s
largest, produced and performed a play about their vision for Mumbai. Without acknowledging, accepting, and
considering Mumbai’s slums, it is impossible to have a productive conversation about the future of the
city’s development.

Slum Eviction

84

“Slum eviction” refers to the eviction of slum dwellers from their homes—in many cases
unfairly—to make way for upmarket developments. Many slum redevelopment projects, while designed to move
populations out of harsh living conditions, result in a loss of livelihood for slum dwellers, who rely heavily
on the economic and social networks established within the slum. Often, slum dwellers are offered free houses
in exchange for the land where their homes are located. However, many exceptions to this arrangement make them
ineligible for a free home and would most likely result in them being displaced to another slum.

The Lab featured a screening of the documentary Bombay: Our City,
which questioned the notion of illegal housing and slum eviction on public land and examined the unfair
treatment of Mumbai’s working-class citizens who live in these areas.

Slum Typology

85

In many older slums that have developed over time, an architectural typology has evolved that is uniquely
suited to the social and economic systems of the community. In Mumbai, this typology is best represented by a
building sometimes referred to as the “tool house,” which encompasses a work space on the ground
floor, living space above, and sometimes opportunities for rental accommodations; the cumulative arrangement
serves multiple functions and is built to shift and change with family dynamics.

During Design Challenge, an event that was part of the Mumbai Lab’s Bridging series, architecture
students were challenged by a slum contractor to design a house suited to slum typology; the project’s
goal was to help them better understand the importance of the typology’s many intricacies.

Space Scarcity

86

With an estimated density of more than 20,000 people per square kilometer, Mumbai is more tightly packed than
almost any city in the world. This, combined with sky-high real estate prices, means that space in the city,
whether public or private, is scarce, and comes at a premium.

During Mediating Public-Private Investment, Lab Team member Neville Mars discussed new ways of thinking about
increasing space in Mumbai, such as the creation of “infraspace,” a term he coined to describe
urban expansion that is paralleled and facilitated by the development of high-speed transit.

Split City

87

The idea of the split city refers to the various interdependencies between the formal and informal components
of a city (“formal” and “informal” defined as sectors officially or unofficially
recognized by the government). In a split city, there are severe institutional and infrastructural gaps that
exclude citizens from access to water, housing, and transportation, among other needs. While this dichotomy is
a provocative lens through which to view the city, it prevents us from imagining pragmatic
cross-collaborations that can bridge this divide. Rather, framing an integrated policy that reconciles the
bottom-up views of the local population with the top-down perspective of planners requires the participation
of stakeholders from all sides, sectors, and levels.

The split city concept inspired the Mumbai Lab’s Meet in the Middle series of ten events that brought
together stakeholders from all areas of the development spectrum to discuss how to bridge top-down and
bottom-up planning efforts in a way that will serve all citizens.

Stacked Population Index (SPI)

88

“Stacked Population Index” (SPI) is a term developed by Mumbai Lab Team member Neville Mars as an
alternative way of measuring population density based on Floor Space Index (FSI) and building typologies.
Using Google Earth to create a detailed map of the current population density of Mumbai, this methodology
examines the average density in gridded map cells of 500 square meters. These numbers form the basis of the
new SPI index, revealing precisely how it varies and reflects living conditions throughout the city.

A visual representation of the city of Mumbai, rendered as a model and derived using the city’s SPI
data, was placed in the Lab to illustrate an alternative way of depicting the city’s density and
revealing where gaps exist in access to transportation and resources.

Time Scarcity

89

Time scarcity is a condition that leaves urban dwellers with restricted amounts of time for activities
outside of work, including transit and activities related to everyday subsistence. It is a constraint that
most greatly affects those with limited economic means, as time scarcity has an inverse correlation with
financial earnings. Poor urban transport systems and overburdened infrastructures often hold citizens hostage
to varying amounts of time scarcity. Those urban dwellers who have greater wealth are better able to negotiate
this time constraint by employing others to handle household chores—such as cleaning, cooking, and shopping
for groceries—and they may rely on other strategies such as hiring a driver, or living in closer proximity to
their place of work, so they can avoid losing time to commuting; in effect, these tactics “buy”
them more time for more leisurely activities.

Split City: Time Scarcity, Space Scarcity was a program that examined the lack of time that Mumbaikars must
contend with due to the city’s overtaxed infrastructure and urban layout; participants in the
conversation sought to define a feasible solution to the issue.

Transactional Capacities

90

The transactional capacity of a neighborhood refers to the number of community, economic, or business
transactions for which the area allows. Dense, mixed-use environments tend to have high transactional capacity
due to the diversity of economic and social activities the typology supports.

Many of Mumbai’s typologies, particularly slum typologies, support high levels of transactional
capacities, while consuming fewer resources than high-rises. In Rethinking Skywalks and Sealinks, architect
Rupali Gupte discussed how megaprojects “ruffle” this logic and break existing networks, putting
residents into infrastructural situations with fewer transactional capabilities than they once had and
sometimes reducing the cumulative transactions to a very small number.

Trust

91

Effective urban relationships are largely based on notions of trust, rather than on systems that rely on
control. While strategies of trust imply uncertainty about the outcomes of certain interactions—which can
prove challenging for some—they are also known to benefit process-driven thinking and experimentation. Trust
leads to more convivial cities in ever more diverse urban contexts.

Two blindfolded tours of Mumbai challenged Mumbaikars to trust unknown guides, and the strangers accompanying
them, who would ensure their safety while moving blindfolded through the city; in doing so, participants
discovered the benefits of such interactions while gaining a new perspective on the sensory experience of
Mumbai.

Twenty-Year Plan

92

City governments typically use twenty-year plans when determining and communicating their medium- to
long-term visions for a city’s physical development. Twenty-year plans typically set broad overarching
goals that provide direction for the city’s land-use allocation, related zoning and bylaws, and other
land-use policies. While the plans are considered important for ensuring a cohesive, comprehensive, and
strategic approach to city planning, they are often criticized for being inflexible in cases of unexpected
shifts in city dynamics.

In 2014, Mumbai will roll out its next twenty-year plan. One session of the Lab’s Meet in the Middle
series, Planning in a Dynamic City, was dedicated to discussing how the plan could be developed in a more
collaborative fashion to better represent the visions of the city’s residents and be more flexible in
response to the city’s constant fluctuations.

Urban Data

93

Urban data is the information that cities produce, which is measured and turned into facts, figures, and visualizations. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google, the amount of data collected between the dawn of humanity and 2003 is equivalent to the amount we now produce every two days. This phenomenon of massively proliferating data, increasingly referred to as “big data,” comes with the task of filtering and making accessible this new wealth of information.

During Planning in a Dynamic City, digital strategy consultant Sam Lockwood emphasized how data-led planning
would enable Mumbai to be more agile and adaptive to its own rapidly changing needs.

Urban Farming

94

Urban farming—the practice of cultivating edible plants in densely populated areas—aims to produce organic
food for consumption or sale to meet the needs of the local population through local resources. Urban farming
can empower city dwellers to take charge of their own nutrition, increase awareness about health, and create
food and financial security. Urban farms can be as simple as a selection of edible plants planted in discarded
plastic bottles or an installation of grow bags set up in someone’s home. More sophisticated examples
include rooftop plant beds that utilize rainwater irrigation systems.

Children learned the basic skills necessary for urban farming during Fooducate, the hands-on Food for Thought
series event held in Sambhaji Park.

Urban Sensory Experience

95

Urban sensory experience speaks to the vastly complicated network of human senses and interactions—generated
by the interplay between individuals and groups, by one’s own physical sensory system, and by the
experience of the physical layout and appearance of city spaces—that impact the way one perceives and moves
through the city. These obvious and sometimes undetected stimuli shape our everyday decision-making and
well-being (consciously and subconsciously). Being more attuned to how the built environment can affect
citizens’ decisions and well-being may inform future urban design in a positive way.

Gaining new perspective on this dimension of daily life, Lab visitors experienced Mumbai in an entirely new
way during two Sensing Mumbai blindfolded tours of the city.

Urban Sound

96

“Urban sound” refers to the vast range of sounds that the city produces. From the rhythm of the
steam engine to the drone of the automobile, the sound of our city has always been a defining characteristic
of urban life. While these sounds have served as creative inspiration for various artists, from the Futurists
to John Cage, they also contribute to overstimulation. Through recent developments in technology, sound can
also be harnessed as a valuable tool for measuring various data sets in the city.

After taking a blindfolded tour of Mumbai, visitors to the second part of Sensing Mumbai discussed their
surprising findings, including what the many sounds of the city conveyed to them when they were unable to
see.

Urban Violence

97

“Urban violence” refers to physical, emotional, and psychological abuse that occurs in cities, in
both public and private spaces. Such violence can take the form of premeditated or impromptu individual,
group, or institutional acts. Urban violence can result from a diversity of causes including social, economic,
political, and institutional pressures. It is a serious issue that is accompanied by an increase in fear and
insecurity and often requires intervention. There has been an increased acknowledgement that government, the
private sector, and civil society alike should continue to prioritize violence reduction and prevention by
providing more cross-sector solutions, making more channels accessible for the abused and abusers to seek
help, and identifying appropriate interventions.

Being Brave: Privacy and the World Around You was a program that spoke directly to the challenging issue of
urban violence by openly addressing domestic and street violence that permeates everyday lives of many local
populations. During the Women and Social Spaces session, Mumbai women expressed a strong wish that urban
spaces would be safer for women; they discussed the fact that they ought to be able to feel safe in the city
at any hour, dressed in whatever way they want, without fear of violence or harassment.

Visible Women

98

In cultures in which gender inequality is pervasive, girls and women are often afraid to be seen in the
public sphere, except when absolutely necessary. In cities, this cultural dynamic manifests itself in unsafe
environments for those women who do venture out. The concept of “visible women” represents a
movement that advocates for more women to make themselves present in urban public spaces: in streets,
playgrounds, markets, public squares, on public transportation, and elsewhere. This movement is guided by the
belief that the more women are present in public spaces, the safer those spaces become for all women. The
effort is part of a larger, evolving movement that demands women’s safety be a priority in urban
environments around the world.

During the event Women and Social Spaces, the need for visible women in public spaces throughout Indian
cities emerged as a key theme in a discussion led by the women’s advocacy group Blank Noise.

Walkability

99

Walkability is a measure of how pedestrian-friendly an area is. Factors that affect walkability include the
presence and quality of pedestrian footpaths; traffic and road conditions; and accessibility, safety, density,
connectivity, and proximity. Walkability is also influenced by how well neighborhoods and major commercial or
transportation hubs are connected to each other. Design details that improve walkability include clear
pedestrian crossings, safe and well-maintained sidewalks, well-lit paths, shade or sun in the appropriate
seasons, the presence of street furniture, and human-scaled street frontages. Cities that promote walkability
achieve many positive health, environmental, and economic benefits.

At the Lab, professor and author Colin Ellard described the development of “street psychogeography,”
sharing some of his findings about how the walkability of a city affects a person’s psychological and
physiological response. Ellard also discussed future prospects for this fruitful method of studying the human
response to place.

Water Quality

100

Water quality refers to the potability of water and its condition for human consumption or use. Urban
development has had a profound effect on water quality due to the impact of large-scale development over
extensive areas. As cities grow, there is an increase in factors that can harm the quality of local water
resources. This has driven governments to implement measures to protect bodies of water and to increase the
standard quality of urban water supplies distributed to its citizens.

In Comfortably Sustainable, participants discussed access to clean water. Panelists analyzed a pilot project
for water privatization in K East ward as a possible model for how the city could solve some issues relating
to water quality and supply.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab Mumbai

101

After its launch in New York in the summer of 2011, and its subsequent presentation in Berlin in the summer of 2012,
the BMW Guggenheim Lab traveled to Mumbai. The Mumbai Lab engaged local organizations on citywide research projects and
Mumbai-specific design projects to explore and suggest new ways for citizens, designers, and city officials to approach
public space in Mumbai, with a focus on individual and community needs. Over the course of six weeks, at six locations,
the Lab offered free public programs related to these city projects and studies that included participatory studies,
tours, talks, workshops, film screenings, and cultural activities. The programming in Mumbai was developed as a set of
series based on a variety of topics. These series included Meet in the Middle, Bridging, Unwrapping Mumbai, Food for
Thought, City Dreams, Transformers, and Film.

As part of the culmination of the Lab’s experience in Mumbai, this glossary aims to identify 100 of the most
talked-about trends in urban thinking that played a role at the Lab’s first Asian venue. These terms and their
definitions aim to document and take the “temperature” of a particular time and place —Mumbai in the winter of 2012 and
early 2013 — and to shed light on what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what cities were, are,
and can be. Each definition concludes with an example of a Mumbai Lab program that illustrated the relevance and
context of each term.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. One hundred of them, discussed
at the Mumbai Lab, follow.

Mumbai

102

The BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in Mumbai from December 9, 2012, through January 20, 2013.

3-D Printer

1

A 3-D printer is a machine that prints objects by laying down successive layers of plastic or other
materials. 3-D printers have existed since the 1980s. Today, several companies are working to create models
that are available for personal use and at a low price point. In the last few years, the rise of 3-D printers
in rapid prototyping has popularized and democratized the creation of objects at an individual level, proving
that there is a viable alternative to the previous dependence on industrial mass production. This radical
change has been a turning point for a variety of fields, most notably biomedicine, architecture, and design.
Thus, 3-D printers are changing the way we understand and construct our built environment.

Children and adults explored the possibilities of rapid self-manufacturing with miniature mobile 3-D printers
at Make Your Own Anything Day with the educational services cooperative HTINK and MakerBot Industries, a
company that manufactures 3-D printers.

The 99 Percent

2

The Occupy Wall Street movement’s slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” references the vast
income divide in the United States, where an extreme concentration of wealth exists among the top-earning one
percent of the population, and recognizes the power associated with that wealth. “The 99 percent”
refers to the rest of the population, and conveys the suggestion that both wealth and power should be more
equally distributed. The Lab’s run in New York coincided with the time when the Occupy Wall Street
movement took root. As the movement developed and its message spread across the world, “the 99 percent”
became a commonly recognized, understood, and utilized term. This term has been credited with transcending
traditional polarizations of left and right and reframing political dialogue to center around the concept of
inequity.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall
Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan.
Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for
skyscrapers.

Accessibility

3

“Accessibility” describes the ease with which something can be reached, obtained, used, or
understood by as many people as possible. Though often used in reference to accessibility design—urban design
that takes into account the full spectrum of other-abled (including elderly, disabled, and handicapped)
individuals by creating a user-friendly urban and domestic environment—“accessibility” can also
refer to a citizen’s ability to obtain basic services such as health care, education, employment, or
information, or to participate in political or cultural activities.

Free Community Health Care Day offered complementary holistic health services such as acupuncture, massage,
and herbal medicine consultations to the public, while highlighting how such services can be provided
affordably for all.

Accessible Health Care

4

“Accessible health care” refers to health services that can be obtained by a population, without
physical, financial, organizational, social, or cultural barriers limiting their utilization. Access does not
refer merely to the supply of services, but also to the affordability, physical accessibility, and social and
cultural acceptance of a citizen’s need and right to those services. In the United States, health
insurance is a major determinant of a citizen’s access to both preventative and acute health care;
employment and income heavily determine barriers to health-care access.

As part of the New York Lab’s Sunday Salon Series, Dr. David Ores discussed his work as a provider of
low-cost, general medical care to the poor and uninsured. He is a founder of the Restaurant Workers’
Health Care Cooperative, which enables restaurants on the Lower East Side to inexpensively provide their
workers with access to his services.

Affordable Housing

5

In the United States, as in many other countries, “affordable housing” is generally understood to
refer to housing for which a household pays no more than 30 percent of its annual income. According to the US
Department of Housing and Urban Development, “Families who pay more than 30 percent of their income for
housing are considered cost burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing,
transportation, and medical care.” Recently, there has been a movement to encompass other costs within
the definition of affordable housing, as reflected in the MIT/CRE Housing Affordability Initiative’s
Housing Affordability Index, which takes other factors into account when determining area affordability, such
as adequate access to jobs, school quality, and environmental amenities associated with a residence’s
location. Especially in the context of the economic recession, the issue of housing affordability is emerging
globally as a pressing subject in both developed and developing countries.

New York Lab Team members ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] discussed gentrification and the local effects of
globalization processes during their time at the Lab. Access to affordable housing emerged as a salient and
critical issue in the Lower East Side and New York as a whole.

Aging Population

6

Today, 20 percent of the population is older than sixty-five; by 2060, every third person will have reached
that age. The effect of the aging population on the urban environment and on social services is one of the
most significant global challenges and opportunities of the next fifty years. Intergenerational exchange
creates opportunities for knowledge-sharing and social interaction. Urban design, community initiatives, and
public services can help meet the needs of young and old citizens alike.

During the New Aging event, architect Matthias Hollwich shed light on how our cities often shut out the
elderly through inaccessible design, and proposed solutions as to how architecture and urbanism can be
reengineered to support new, aging-appropriate living typologies.

Altruism

7

“Altruism” refers to the belief in, or act of, showing concern for the well-being of others in a
manner that is selfless or disinterested, and that may occur at some cost to oneself. A person is understood
to behave altruistically when he or she acts in a way that benefits other people, even if it is to his or her
own detriment to do so.

During Love Night, psychology and neuroeconomics experts were challenged to design the ideal environment that
could coax even the most hardened New Yorker into behaving altruistically. They explored how design-related
and citizen-initiated actions can encourage more friendly and altruistic behavior in day-to-day city life.

Bailout

8

A bailout is the act of financially assisting a failing business or economy in order to save it from
collapse. Today, the term “bailout” is frequently used in reference to the Emergency Economic
Stabilization Act of 2008, in which the US government acted in response to the international credit and
subprime mortgage crises by spending $700 billion to purchase troubled assets.

The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting Time Sit-In was an event that brought together Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marcel
van der Meijs, and activists from the Lower East Side for a sit-in to share squatting stories, strategies, and
analysis of spaces used for formal and informal social interaction.

Bike Politics

9

“Bike politics” refers to the debate on greater bike infrastructure in cities. From the need for
more bike lanes and more secure bike storage to better safety and traffic laws to reduce cyclist fatalities,
bike politics covers many issues and can vary from city to city. In New York, advocacy groups like
Transportation Alternatives have made incredible achievements for the biking community; Janette Sadik-Khan,
New York Department of Transportation Commissioner, has overseen the addition of more than 285 miles of bike
lanes since taking office in 2007.

Mobility in Cities involved a discussion between Benoit Jacob, head of BMW i Design (the BMW division devoted
to sustainability in transport), and New York City Department of Transportation chief of staff Margaret
Newman. The duo explored the future of urban mobility as it relates to public transportation, bikes, and
cars.

Bottom-Up Urban Engagement

10

Bottom-up urban engagement places the citizen at the root of urban change. The term “bottom-up”
first appeared in relation to its opposite, “top-down,” in the 1942 edition of Harvard University’s
Quarterly Journal of Economics: “In the long run it is part
of the larger question of whether ’bottom-up’ control can be as efficient as ‘top-down’
control.” In an urban context, this approach has two key, complementary dimensions: first, a trend that
encourages social, cooperative models of city organization; second, a growing interest from government
officials, academia, and the professional sector in resorting to digital, open-sourced data and models as key
resources for understanding urban interactions.

The Hester Street Collaborative launched the website, peoplemakeparks.org, at the BMW Guggenheim Lab New
York. The People Make Parks initiative facilitates bottom-up urban engagement by making the New York City
Department of Parks and Recreation’s capital-projects design process accessible to local community
groups and citizens, allowing them to participate in park design.

Carbon Fiber

11

Carbon fiber is a composite consisting of fibrillated acrylic resin, polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and pitch (oil),
which has been treated with heat. It is extremely strong, low-density, heat-resistant, and lightweight, making
it desirable for use in a wide variety of fields, from aerospace and aircraft to electronics and medical
science. On a smaller scale, the material can be found in automobiles and bikes as well as tennis rackets and
fishing rods. The material’s origins date back to the late 1800s, when Thomas Edison exposed bamboo
fibers to high temperatures to make filaments for light bulbs.

The BMW Guggenheim Lab’s initial architectural structure was conceived and designed in carbon fiber by
Tokyo-based architects Momoyo Kajima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow, making the Lab the first such
structure ever to be made primarily out of carbon fiber. Kaijima spoke about the firm, past projects, and the
reasons for utilizing carbon fiber in the BMW Guggenheim Lab.

Chameleonic Citizenship

12

Chameleonic citizenship is the state of flexible identity that is required of urban dwellers today. In
response to continuous shifts in life and work and ever more fluid borders, the individual is no longer bound
to an established national allegiance. Rather, chameleonic citizenship implies an open identity in which
citizens are free to take on different roles, adapt to ever-changing urban needs, and build communities and
networks independent of proximity and facilitated through technology. This transformation on the part of the
individual mitigates the inability of urban infrastructure to respond rapidly to his or her needs. This shift
will influence policymaking and political-decision processes, as well as the physical organization of urban
spaces.

In Our Migration Story, the Latin American and Caribbean Community Center led participants in mapping their
personal migration stories and identifying the complex nature of identity in cities.

Changemaking

13

Changemaking is the act of working toward the goal of changing systems on a fundamental level in such a way
that they benefit society as a whole. While closely related to social entrepreneurship—the use of
entrepreneurial principles or enterprises to solve social problems or effect social change, which was
popularized in the 1980s by management-consultant-cum-social-entrepreneur Bill Drayton—changemakers can work
in a number of capacities or frameworks to achieve their goals of systematic change.

In Smart Living in a World of Multiple Modernities, FreedomLab’s Thieu Besselink discussed how
individual citizen actions and interventions, on personal, societal, and global levels, can create small- and
large-scale change.

City Manifesto

14

“City manifesto” refers to a public declaration of actionable steps for a city. The word “manifesto”
was adopted into English during the seventeenth century, derived from an Italian word meaning “make
public”; it is originally from the Latin manifestus, meaning
“palpable” or “obvious.”

Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] presented their
conclusions about this topic after hosting the Lab in New York, where they encouraged the creation of a
collective manifesto for the city of New York.

Cityness

15

“Cityness” is a term coined by sociologist Saskia Sassen in her 2005 essay, “Cityness in
the Urban Age.” She refers to urban agglomerations that do not necessarily have all the attributes
associated with traditional Western notions of the city but still produce meaningful public spaces. Our
definition of urbanity is steeped in certain tropes that do not support the full range of informal urban
activity. The term “cityness” refers to those interstitial spaces, areas of differences, and
moments of intersection that constitute contemporary urban life. Shanghai is an emblematic example of this new
kind of urbanism, as seen in the city’s ability to create new situations from existing structures (such
as a bus shelter that, as observed by architect QinYu Ma, becomes a place to play cards at night).

Sassen, who is the Robert S. Lynd professor of sociology at Columbia University, examined notions of comfort
and cityness in the global city of New York.

Climate Change

16

Climate change is the slow alteration of weather patterns that occurs over time as a result of various
conditions, including natural geographic transformation, orbital variations, evolution, and human influence.
There is serious debate about the current and future repercussions of climate change. These effects may be
ultimately irreversible and are largely due to an increase in carbon dioxide levels—the highest levels of
which are produced in cities. Through large-scale intergovernmental guidelines (such as the Kyoto Protocol of
1997) and individual initiatives, urban planners and citizens are becoming more aware of these issues,
resulting in more responsible design and lifestyle choices that can lead to urgently needed reductions in
emissions.

While many hope that good planning and new technology will help cities lead the way in reducing and
mitigating the negative effects of climate change, others believe cities are doomed in the face of it. Two
critics from opposite ends of the spectrum, James S. Russell, author of The Agile City: Building Well Being and Wealth in an Era of Climate Change,
and James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century,
debated the future of urban life in Renaissance or Long Emergency? A Debate on the City’s Future.

Collective Memory

17

The term “collective memory,” as it is commonly used today, can be traced back to the work of
French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is closely related
to the concept of collective consciousness. It refers to a memory shared by a group of people, sometimes
passed from one generation to the next. In sociology, it can also be defined as group representations of the
past that inform actions in the present. The concept of collective memory has been challenged in academia on
the grounds that being conscious of—or remembering—something is an act that can only be done by an individual.
However, the term is widely accepted and used within the social sciences.

On the date of the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, Jake Barton, of the design firm Local Projects, presented
his firm’s work on interpreting and integrating collective memory into the media design of Manhattan’s
9/11 Memorial and Museum, and discussed the role of collective memory in the creation of public memorials.

Combined Sewer System

18

A combined sewer system collects multiple types of water—rain or storm-water runoff, domestic sewage, and
sometimes industrial wastewater—in the same infrastructure. Introduced in 1855 as a solution for cesspool
ditches, combined sewer systems are still used by many older cities, though they are currently seen as
problematic due to the risk of combined sewer overflows. This type of overflow occurs during times of heavy
rainfall when the system becomes overwhelmed by runoff, forcing untreated water and raw sewage to bypass
treatment and flow directly into nearby streams, rivers, or other bodies of water. Combined sewer systems have
been abandoned in most up-to-date urban infrastructures.

Most of New York still operates on a combined sewer system, which results in hundreds of combined sewer
overflows per year. During his two-and-a-half weeks of programming at the Lab, wastewater biologist
Olatunbosun Obayomi focused on waste and water infrastructure in New York and other cities around the world,
presenting ideas for neighborhood-scale waste-treatment structures that could help mitigate the negative
impact of combined sewer overflows while also producing renewable energy.

Community Garden

19

As shared spaces, community gardens offer the possibility of outdoor space in urban areas to those who wouldn’t
otherwise have access to green spaces; they can also provide a certain measure of independence for city
dwellers who are able to grow their own food. The gardens produce a feeling of ownership and care for a
collectively owned piece of land.

In New York’s East Village neighborhood, there are more than thirty-five community gardens that have
been active since the 1970s. These urban oases emerged after local citizens decided to occupy vacant lots
throughout the area, which were prevalent at the time, and turn them into gardens. The Lab’s location in
New York was First Park, a community garden on First Street and Second Avenue that had been derelict for
several years. The three-part workshop series What’s Next? was led by the local community group First
Street Green. The group collectively gathered and analyzed data from the community surrounding the Lab in an
effort to determine what the space should become once the Lab left. After the Lab concluded, First Park became
an open, community-run space for cultural activities.

Community-Led Development

20

Community-led development is a model wherein community members, local businesses, nonprofits, and local
government agencies collectively take a leadership role in development projects. Through community
cooperatives and task forces, citizens are empowered to identify local issues and generate solutions based on
local knowledge. The positive outcomes of this type of development, when combined with appropriate city
collaboration and follow-up, include greater citizen support for development plans relevant to the real needs
of a neighborhood.

Lab Team member Omar Freilla offered a workshop on how to start a worker cooperative. Sunset Park Toxicity
Tour and Community Visions was a tour through Sunset Park, Brooklyn, led by Freilla and activists from the
advocacy group United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE). Participants heard from community
members about their struggles and victories against the city and state regarding the area’s polluting
industries.

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

21

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a system of farm operation whereby producers (farmers) and consumers
share both the benefits and risks of food production. Typically, CSA shareholders pay a sum up front each
season to join the CSA. In return, they receive shares in the farm’s production throughout the growing
season and harvest. CSAs are a relatively recent phenomenon, sparked by widespread concern about food
security, quality, and industrialization. They date back to the 1960s in Japan and Europe, and to the
mid-1980s in the United States.

Community Supported Agriculture is one method of obtaining fresh, local produce, the importance of which was
stressed at Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan.

Commuting

22

How we get from the home to the workplace is one of the most important factors in modern urban dynamics.
Commuting is a phenomenon characteristic of the industrialized era. The meaning of the word “commute”
as we refer to it here dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when train travelers could purchase a “commutation
ticket”—a rail pass for multiple trips that “commuted” the price of travel by combining
individual fares in a single ticket. Today, commuting can involve any form of transportation, and is closely
related to flows of movement within cities and the existence of morning and evening rush hours. Commuting has
had a crucial impact on the type and speed of growth in the urban landscape, facilitating the creation of
suburbs and dormitory towns.

At the Lab, Alejandro de Castro led the program Your Brain on Commuting. He was joined by author Tom
Vanderbilt and psychologist and urban-transit expert Carlos Felipe Pardo; together, they analyzed the impact
of commuting on the way we think and behave daily. Carlos Felipe Pardo led the Transit Psychology Tour, which
explored the psychological effects of commuting. He concluded that the quality and length of a commute can
have significant effects on a person’s well-being and quality of life.

Complaint

23

Complaining is the act of voicing one’s personal concerns or grievances in a public space. The First
Amendment of the United States Constitution defines the right of people to peacefully assemble and petition,
and in London, Speakers’ Corner, located in Hyde Park, is one place where people are free to voice their
opinions. A more recent development in the United States is the use of “free speech zones,” a
tactic the Bush administration employed to isolate protestors by offering temporary and physically constrained
areas of protest.

Growing Up and Old on the Lower East Side invited locals to share five-minute stories about their changing
neighborhood. Here, the act of public speech allowed people to feel a sense of community and understand the
shared nature of their concerns and memories.

Confronting Comfort

24

“Comfort” is understood as a feeling of relief or contentment. In order to achieve this desirable
state, people have pursued diverse means to alleviate their troubles. Encompassing communication commodities,
fancy gadgets, and privacy and security devices as well as comfort food and other ways of appeasing our
bodies, these temporary forms of relief help us divert our minds from the repetitive activities of everyday
life. Maximizing comfort has also become a measure of individual wealth, success, and status. Unfortunately,
our irrepressible aspiration to find ease often leads us in unsustainable directions that benefit only a
select few. Confronting comfort is the practice of finding a balance between notions of modern comfort and the
urgent need for environmentally responsible solutions that empower us all.

Architect and Lab Advisory Committee member Elizabeth Diller spoke at the Lab about architecture that enables
and encourages urbanites to slow down and stop—such as New York’s High Line park—as a means of seeking,
and designing for, comfort in urban settings.

Container Architecture

25

Container architectural involves the use of shipping containers as construction units and goes as far back as
the creation of shipping containers themselves. The first modern shipping container was put into service in
1956 by American trucker and entrepreneur Malcom McLean, who built a whole shipping fleet around the concept.
Container architecture involves prefabricated, stackable, and cheap modular structures that can be easily
transported. Typically, the containers are built out as makeshift shelters that house construction trailers,
toilets, dressing rooms, military-related structures, or disaster-relief solutions; they can also be built
into more permanent homes and offices. In recent years, the structures have increasingly been used in creative
and commercial industries, which have adopted the containers’ industrial, rugged look as a fashionable
expression of temporality. No longer as much of a cutting-edge practice as it once was, container architecture
now appears in cities like New York, Berlin, and London, and is used for art gallery spaces, trendy retail
stores, and pop-up offices.

Cooperatives

26

A cooperative is a business or organization jointly owned and run by its members, who share its benefits or
profit. Unofficially, cooperatives have existed since the dawn of human society, but today in many countries
they are considered legal entities that operate under cooperative laws. The first known official cooperative
was the Fenwick Weavers Society, formed in 1761 in Fenwick, Scotland. However, the Rochdale Pioneers, a group
of twenty-eight cotton artisans in Rochdale, England, in the mid-1800s, are generally credited as the founders
of the movement, creating the prototype of the modern cooperative. Today, cooperatives extend to many sectors,
most notably housing, banking, agriculture, and business.

The Celebration of All Things Cooperative explored cooperatives as a viable form of democratizing services or
access to goods and ensuring fair and equal benefit for workers.

Corporate Sponsorship

27

Corporate sponsorship is a way for corporations to financially support individuals, projects, or
institutions, sometimes merely in exchange for brand recognition but also to advance the ideals of giving back
to communities, broadly known as corporate social responsibility. By supporting certain kinds of initiatives,
corporations seek to align themselves with the philosophy and core values represented by the supported project
of choice. Corporate sponsorship also has tax-relief implications and can be seen as a type of philanthropy,
with roots reaching back to ancient Greece. Today, corporate sponsorship is most often associated with efforts
by institutions to secure funds from large companies. Corporate sponsorships are often associated with
nonprofit organizations. Without them, many initiatives would never come to fruition due to increasing lack of
governmental support or dwindling institutional resources. The risk of corporate sponsorship is that
corporations, given their financial contributions, can feel entitled to shape the projects they fund. Positive
and meaningful corporate sponsorship assumes the integrity of the content of the projects being funded. While
it has had a long tradition in the United States and is a practice on the rise in Asia, corporate sponsorship
has generally been less socially accepted in Europe, where it is associated with the commercialization of
society and the spread of an advertisement mentality. Corporate sponsorship and brand-driven marketing shapes
the visual landscape of our cities through common practices such as the funding and naming of new stadiums,
performance centers, and other prominent urban sites. When done correctly, particularly in the
financial-crisis-minded twenty-first century, corporate sponsorship can be a powerful supplement to private
and government support and can lead to a greater sense of social responsibility within large corporations.

Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, touched on corporate sponsorship in the talk she gave
about how the confluence of sustainability imperatives, economic stagnation, and digitally enabled creativity
has given rise to a movement of connected consumption.

Data Visualization

28

Data visualization is the representation of information through graphs and other visual means. The purpose of
data visualization is to translate complex data sets or subjective information into easily digestible, graphic
forms, bringing together the practical need to communicate with an aesthetic sensibility. Visualizing urban
behavior and patterns can create awareness about important urban conditions (traffic, cell phone use, bike
use, pollution levels) and can also enable planners and other observers to diagnose situations that need
improvement.

In City of Bits, Bytes, and People, Assaf Biderman, associate director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab,
discussed how recent developments in technology are enabling us to extract and visualize more data from cities
than ever before, vastly broadening the spectrum of how we can understand our cities today.

De Dépendance

29

De dépendance is a term coined by the Rotterdam-based
architectural studio ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] to refer to the process of culture becoming independent
and financially self-sufficient. ZUS established De Dépendance—Center for Urban Culture as a way to bolster
cultural potential in Rotterdam.

Momoyo Kaijima, principal of Atelier Bow-Wow, and Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman,
principals of ZUS, discussed the role of architecture in community building.

Department of Listening

30

The Department of Listening is an imaginary city office designed to receive and respond to citizen feedback.
This fictional, 311-like government entity would truly listen to the real needs of citizens with a sense of
immediacy, and would allow for a more direct path of citizen-to-government communication, thanks to new uses
of technology freed from the burdens of bureaucracy. The Department of Listening would bridge the gap between
the city and its inhabitants at the street level, and allow for a two-way exchange of resources and
information. The term was coined by Lab curator Maria Nicanor during the United Nations Social Media week in
October 2011, in a session devoted to the possible uses of social media for more effective citizen
participation. An example of active city listening can be found in initiatives like Boston’s Citizens
Connect, a mobile-phone app developed by city officials that allows Bostonians to report and immediately
address neighborhood issues.

Participatory Budgeting was a tutorial on a new form of open-source governance where neighborhood residents
can vote on priorities for government spending.

Design Barriers

31

Design barriers are construction choices that limit or control an individual’s access to urban spaces.
From “No Loitering” signs to benches with armrests designed to prevent homeless people from
sleeping on them, our cities are full of devices meant to disperse and divide citizens along lines of race,
class, and age.

Architecture for Everyone was a discussion led by Interboro Partners about how design decisions can either
include or exclude.

Dumpster Design

32

Dumpster design is an approach that employs used or discarded objects as raw materials for new products.
Dumpster design has emerged out of a growing trend toward sustainable consumption, which promotes alternative
economic structures facilitated by sharing, recycling, and “freecycling.”

Trash Mappers was a workshop led by the collective Basurama that empowered visitors to analyze their own
waste and design new alternative uses for it. Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 10: A Nonconsumer Wandering,
Gleaning, and Foraging was an urban foraging walk led by spurse, a creative collective.

Emotional Cityness

33

Emotional cityness is the rejection of impersonal and cold relationships in large urban areas in favor of
face-to-face, convivial, and empathic interaction. In a climate of rapid urbanization and uncertainty, with
dynamics leading toward social fragmentation, there is an increasing need for new connectivity in urban
environments that can be achieved through the strengthening of personal relationships. Social interaction
within cities is a vehicle toward community cohesiveness. The need for an increased emotional cityness was
identified by Lab curators Maria Nicanor and David van der Leer as one of the overarching topics of the New
York Lab.

Love Night explored the effects of kindness on the behavior of visitors through various experiments designed
by neuroscientist Paul Zak and psychologist Emanuele Castano. The event People Make Parks celebrated the
launch of an interactive website, peoplemakeparks.org, that allowed New Yorkers to participate in the design
of their parks. The website makes the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s capital-design
process accessible to community groups throughout the city. During Strangers, Terror, and Kindness in Cities,
Castano and Zak explored the role that chemistry, empathy, and compassion play in urban life.

Empathy

34

“Empathy” is defined by psychologists as the ability to recognize the emotion of a fellow human
and, consequently, experience the same emotion oneself. Not to be confused with sympathy—the ability to feel
pity for another—empathy is recognized as a key driver in the evolutionary development of human society by
leading us to care for and tolerate other humans, even strangers. First coined in English in the early
twentieth century, empathy is a direct translation of the German equivalent, Einfühlung (“feeling into”), and is modeled on the Greek
en (“in”) and pathos
(“feeling”). All mammals experience empathy to varying degrees.

Psychologist Emanuele Castano engaged in a public dialogue with neuroeconomist Paul Zak about the science
behind empathy, how it effects our treatment of those dissimilar from us, and our behavior toward strangers in
the public realm.

Environmental Justice

35

Environmental justice is the idea that all people, regardless of race, class, or gender should benefit from a
healthy environment. Research has shown that the most unpleasant elements of city infrastructure, such as
landfills, waste-processing facilities, and energy plants, are routinely placed in marginalized communities.
The term “environmental justice” dates back to the 1960s and ’70s. During that period, a
string of protests across the United States decrying the unfair dumping of hazardous waste in low-income
neighborhoods sparked a heated debate and investigation into the correlation between polluted and unsafe
geographies and those inhabited by poor or minority populations. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA),
established in 1970, had not yet sufficiently acknowledged environmental racism. As a result of a call for
action by the Black Congressional Caucus, the EPA established the Office of Environmental Equity in 1992; its
name was later changed to the Office of Environmental Justice.

Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 6: Just Systems and Environmental Justice by spurse was a tour of the Bronx
River collaboratively organized by Lab Team member and environmental activist Omar Freilla and research and
design collaborative spurse. The goal of the tour was to identify how injustice is perpetuated via natural and
built environments.

Environmental Psychology

36

Environmental psychology is a relatively new field of study that examines the interrelationship between human
behavior and our built or natural surroundings. The term itself is believed to originate in the work of German
physician and psychologist Willy Hellpach (1877–1955).

Environmental psychologist Colin Ellard presented his work and codesigned an experiment with Lab Team member
Charles Montgomery that expanded the boundaries of environmental psychology—previously only examined in a
laboratory setting—by testing people’s mental and physiological reactions to actual urban
environments.

Everyday Democracy

37

While “democracy” generally refers to a system of governance for a state or organization in which
all eligible members partake or exert control equally (usually through elected representatives), “everyday
democracy” describes a system in which equality, access, and individual agency extend beyond the
electoral system to a number of other social dimensions. These can include the workplace, public services,
education systems, family, or social society. The Everyday Democracy Index, a measurement tool initially
introduced for European countries, assesses the extent to which democratic principles and practices pervade
all features of day-to-day life.

During the session Making Democracy Part of Everyday Life, Lab Team member Omar Freilla kicked off his
two-and-a-half weeks of programming by challenging Lab visitors to imagine how various dimensions of
day-to-day life—education, work, spirituality, or family life—would look if they were to function in a truly
democratic fashion.

Eviction

38

Eviction is the forced removal of occupants from a residence or business. While the word comes from the Latin
evictionem, “recovery of one’s property,” in the present day the
owner’s “recovery” often occurs at the expense of the tenant who is forced out.

Organized by Bullet Space, an anarchist squatter community that has existed since 1988, Your House Is Mine
presented a collection of artwork and writing produced in the wake of the 1988 Tompkins Square riots.

Evolutionary Infrastructure

39

Evolutionary infrastructure is an approach to infrastructure, city planning, and architecture that allows for
natural and artificial systems to work together to create a more inhabitable landscape. It refers to the idea
that both engineered and natural systems must be considered as reciprocal evolutionary forces. Large-scale
architectural commissions that have become dominant in recent years, where architects are required to take on
projects that encompass city blocks or neighborhoods, mean that a more holistic approach to infrastructure is
now possible and necessary.

Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss and their Harvard University Graduate School of Design studio led a
presentation and workshop on evolutionary infrastructure, highlighting select inhabitable infrastructure
proposals and completed projects from the early part of the twentieth century.

Fear

40

Feelings of fear influence the way we interact with and behave toward others, especially strangers, in the
public realm. Fear can be acquired from negative personal experience or social observation. The fear of crime
especially can inhibit trust in urban interactions.

Psychologist Emanuele Castano presented his work studying terror theory and “othering” in
Strangers, Terror, and Kindness in Cities, and discussed the underlying psychological patterns that lead us to
fear and inhibit our empathy and trust toward others.

Food Distribution

41

“Food distribution” refers to the broad range of services through which food travels from the
producer to the consumer. These services can include, but are not limited to, food-transportation systems,
wholesalers, farmers’ markets, shops, supermarkets, street food purveyors, and restaurants. The
geographic distribution of these services within a city determines citizens’ access to certain types of
food. Areas with a severe lack of food-distribution services are known as “food deserts.”

In Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan, Tanya Fields shed light on this issue by relating her personal struggle to
access healthy food for her family as a single mother in the Bronx. She presented her work to improve healthy
food distribution and food sovereignty in predominantly black neighborhoods through her organization, the BLK
ProjeK. As part of the Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork sessions, creative consulting and design collaborative
spurse led a tour through and around Hunts Point, the largest wholesale food market in the world, located in
the Bronx.

Genius Hub

42

A genius hub is a city that attracts the best minds from all areas of the arts and sciences. This occurs when
the right combination of educational opportunities, research resources, and job possibilities exist in one
place, providing a generative crucible for innovation, creativity, and creative production. Silicon Valley,
nexus of the information-technology boom, is one example of a genius hub.

In What’s Next? The Legacy of the New York BMW Guggenheim, Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian
Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] presented a workshop to discuss, speculate, and provoke ideas about
how to help First Park continue the Lab’s role as a local genius hub.

Gentrification

43

Gentrification is a global, urban phenomenon whereby underdeveloped areas are transformed. The process is
often coupled with rising rents, a shift in the social fabric of neighborhoods, and in many cases, the influx
of multinational corporations. Gentrification is one of the most polemic terms in urban discourse today. To
some it implies the beautification and positive development of previously underdeveloped areas. However, it
goes hand in hand with the negative effects of lower-income residents being priced out in favor of those who
can afford increased rent prices caused by the process of rapid transformation.

The Lower East Side, where the Lab was located in New York, has undergone an extensive gentrification process
over the past several years. Sharp increases in land value have caused numerous iconic establishments to close
(the beloved Mars Bar on Second Avenue is one example) and many long-time residents have left the
neighborhood, unable to afford rent. The ongoing process of gentrification in the neighborhood came up in many
discussions during programming led by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], which focused on the city’s
sociopolitical systems.

Glocalism

44

“Glocalism,” a term that combines “local” and “global,” speaks to two
forces at play in all neighborhoods. In a climate shaped by rapid globalization and multinational
corporations, widespread sameness is evident in any cosmopolitan hub. Conversely, each city has its own local,
vernacular traditions. Glocalism is the merging of these two seemingly opposing forces.

Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles] introduced their
weekly programs using the notion of glocalism as a starting point.

Grassroots Movement

45

A grassroots movement is an effort launched on a local level by volunteers or members of a community with the
goal of achieving political change on a larger scale. During the time the Lab was open in New York, the
grassroots movement Occupy Wall Street formed in the city’s Financial District, protesting against the
concentration of wealth and power among America’s top-earning one percent. As a game-changing phenomenon
in political activism, the movement made its way into many conversations and programs at the Lab. In response,
a tour of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park was organized, and participants learned firsthand
how the movement functioned and planned to create change.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall
Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan.
Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for
skyscrapers.

Green Space

46

In an urban context, “green space” refers to an open space with natural vegetation such as grass,
trees, bushes, flowers, and other plants. Urban green spaces can include parks, greenways, nature paths,
gardens, and waterfronts. Green spaces provide ecological functions for cities—carbon sequestration, water
purification, and cooling—and also allow people to interact with nature, which has been proven essential to
mental and physical human health. Thus, plentiful public green spaces are a critical feature of good urban
design.

Testing, Testing! was an experiment co-designed by Lab Team member Charles Montgomery and environmental
psychologist Colin Ellard to measure the mental, emotional, and physiological effects of various types of
urban environments. Green spaces proved calming to participants, and elicited positive emotions and higher
levels of concentration.

Hacking the City

47

Hacking the city means transforming the system of a city through informal actions by its own inhabitants.
Sociologist Saskia Sassen developed the idea for this form of grassroots participation as a means of avoiding
the implosion of a future city characterized by machinelike buildings. According to Sassen, the widespread
model of what are called “intelligent cities” leads to a closed technological system that has the
potential to turn cities into cemeteries of obsolete machines. Open-source urbanism could allow people to
interact with—and therefore propose—constant changes in their city’s structure.

Sassen spoke about methods for hacking New York in personal yet transformative ways.

Happy City

48

The Happy City is the concept that cultivating “urban joy” can dramatically improve the city on
an emotional, infrastructural, and economic level. Coming down to the core value of trust, citizens who feel
good about where they live are more likely to take care of it, spend money, and socialize with strangers.

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery introduced the concepts and underlying science of urban joy in the
introduction to his two-and-a-half weeks of programming, where he further investigated and experimented with
the concept of the Happy City, examining how urban design and interactions can make or break human
happiness.

Inclusive Design

49

“Inclusive design” refers to design based on a user-centered approach. The goal of inclusive
design is to ensure that devices, products, environments, and experiences remain equally accessible to
everyone, regardless of age, culture, or ability. In today’s world, we see an increasing need for this
kind of approach, since a diverse population requires more accessible environments, consumer items,
interfaces, and services.

Led by Interboro Partners, Architecture for Everyone explored the different ways in which our cities have a
large preponderance of design devices meant to directly (and often subliminally) disperse and divide citizens
along lines of race, class, and age.

Infrastructure of Waste

50

An infrastructure of waste is a necessary component for every city to control, manage, and dispose of its
waste production in sustainable and responsible ways. Since the very first human settlements, proper
management of waste has been a differentiating quality of human behavior and one that characterizes urban
development and sophistication, evidenced in the complexity of waste systems. According to a project from Lab
Team member Olatunbosun Obayomi—a microbiologist, inventor, and TED Fellow—the intelligent integration of
sewage, water, and sanitation systems could help cities overcome several problems. Using sewage to produce
biogas, the system would be able to simultaneously treat wastewater, generate green energy, and provide clean
water to the population. Several NGOs have acknowledged the promise of Obayomi’s project, and his goal
is to generate support from governments in developing cities that face problems such as frequent floods, open
sewers, and potable water contamination.

Sharing insight on the potential impact of new models, Obayomi spoke about his innovative work in the field
of wastewater management in Nigeria.

Local Food

51

There is no consensus as to what qualifies food as “local,” but generally speaking the term
refers to food that is produced, processed, and sold all within the same region, or within a short
geographical distance from its point of origin. The Food, Conservation, and Energy Act adopted by the US
Congress in 2008 states that food must travel less than 400 miles from its source, or be sold within the state
in which it is produced, to be considered a “locally or regionally produced agricultural food product.”
Though local food still accounts for a small fraction of US agricultural sales, the market is growing rapidly
due to increased demand for fresher produce and consumer desire to support local economies and reduce
environmental impact. City dwellers commonly access local food through farmers’ markets and Community
Supported Agriculture (CSA), and increasingly, in conventional grocery stores.

Local chefs and food distributors cooked and displayed locally produced food, and provided information about
how to access local food in New York in Bronx Grub Takes Manhattan.

Local Knowledge

52

While the traditional definition of “local knowledge” refers to the bodies of knowledge
maintained by groups of people with extended histories of interactions with the natural environment, in the
urban context it refers to cumulative and complex knowledge, understanding, and practices that people in a
given neighborhood, institution, or community have developed over time. Due to the complexity of such
contexts, local knowledge is essential in understanding potential impacts and determining best practices when
considering interventions or developments in cities.

The three-part workshop series What’s Next? was led by the local community group First Street Green.
They collectively gathered and analyzed data from the community around the Lab in order to determine what the
space should become once the Lab left. The lot where the Lab was located, known as First Park, became an open,
community-run space for cultural activities.

Micro Architecture

53

Micro architecture is the practice of using design solutions to adapt small urban spaces, thereby changing
the behavior of city dwellers and activating underutilized areas. Lightweight and compact, the mobile
structure for the New York and Berlin presentations of the Lab—designed by the Tokyo architecture firm Atelier
Bow-Wow—was conceived as a “traveling toolbox,” a structural skeleton that was inserted within the
footprint of a former tenement building on the Lower East Side.

Momoyo Kaijima, principal of Atelier Bow-Wow, and Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman,
principals of the Rotterdam-based architecture studio ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles], discussed the role of
architecture in community building.

Mortgage Crisis

54

The mortgage crisis was the result of a sharp rise in mortgage delinquencies and home foreclosures in the
United States starting in the mid-2000s, due to the high number of subprime mortgages (mortgage loans given to
those who may have difficulty paying them back) being issued. The mortgage crisis led to the 2008 global
financial crisis, deemed by economists to be the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The
economic impact was so severe that the federal government had to intervene with a bailout for banks and other
financial institutions.

The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting Time Sit-In brought together Jeanne van Heeswijk, Marcel van der Meijs,
and activists from the Lower East Side for a sit-in to share squatting stories, strategies, and analysis of
spaces for formal and informal social interaction.

Multicultural Cities

55

Multicultural cities are the result of rising globalization, where cosmopolitan centers see a greater share
of their population made up of international immigrants, expatriates, or foreigners. In the United States,
more than half the children born each year belong to ethnic minority communities. This new level of diversity
has dramatic effects on the economic, social, and physical design of our cities. Visible in the heterogeneity
of ethnic cuisine, religion, language, and skin color, global diversity has the potential to expand a city’s
cultural offerings and improve livability. Conversely, greater difference can lead to separation and conflict
and increases the need for social cohesion. When communities are not integrated, often because of social
stigma and economic determinants, groups can be pushed to the edges of the city into poor neighborhoods with
higher crime rates. City officials must create equal access to opportunity and put into place systems and
resources that have the potential to enrich our urban fabric.

Clara Irazábal, an assistant professor of Urban Planning in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning,
and Preservation at Columbia University—also director of the school’s Latin Lab project—spoke about the
conditions of immigrants in this country and the challenges that a multicultural population poses to
architecture, planning, and development. The Latin American and Caribbean Community Center led participants in
mapping their personal migration stories and identifying the complex nature of identity in cities.

Neighborhood Icon

56

A neighborhood icon is a person who becomes respected in a particular community because of long-term
community organizing, advocacy, and/or general friendliness. While usually not holding any official title or
qualifications, these individuals are essential to community cohesiveness. They excel at effectively
mobilizing other community members and addressing community issues. They often possess strong leadership and
teamwork skills, dexterity in conflict resolution, and the ability to identify goals for community action.

The Sunday Salon Series consisted of five events hosted by Clayton Patterson, longtime East Village resident
and activist.

Neighborhood Loyalty

57

Neighborhood loyalty, a sense of individual loyalty to one’s own neighborhood, can be a powerful tool
to effect collective change in a positive way and to coalesce an authentic community. Remaining loyal to the
needs of our local surroundings can also allow neighbors to generate a unified front in the event of threats
from gentrification.

Exploring this subject, documentarian and activist Clayton Patterson spoke about his long-term commitment to
New York’s Lower East Side.

Neo-Localism

58

“Neo-localism” is a term that refers to direct action taken to support local economies, despite
the encroachment of global influences. Neo-localism can be an important way to support local businesses that
are threatened by larger corporations.

Design collective spurse led visitors on a walking tour of the East Village to see how the local is made and
remade by our collective actions.

Non-Iconic Architecture

59

The term “non-iconic architecture” is a reaction to the proliferation of iconic architecture and
the “starchitecture” trend of the late twentieth century. Iconic architecture has been related to
globalization, consumerism, and the celebrity status of the architects who build such spectacular structures;
in contrast, non-iconic architecture strives to prioritize the human scale of a space over its merely
sculptural value and defends the importance of simplicity and functionality in design.

The design of the BMW Guggenheim Lab by Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow is one example of non-iconic
architecture.

Occupy Wall Street

60

Occupy Wall Street is a global grassroots protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, with a two-month
occupation of Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district. The original occupation inspired
encampments and a variety of protest activities around the globe in resistance to social and economic
inequality, corporate influence on government, and a widening divide in income distribution. The movement
produced the slogan, “We are the 99 percent,” which refers to the divide between the wealthiest
one percent and the rest of the population.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets,
the Wall Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower
Manhattan. Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations
for skyscrapers.

Oxytocin

61

Oxytocin is the hormone responsible for mammalian bonding, trust, empathy, and pro-social behavior. While
best known for its functions during childbirth, sex, and breast-feeding, and in connection with maternal
bonding, studies have shown that oxytocin acts as the social glue that enables us to trust and act generously
and altruistically toward strangers.

During Love Night, neuroeconomist and author of The Moral Molecule,
Paul Zak, explained the science and evolutionary functions of oxytocin and gave participants tips for inducing
oxytocin release in themselves and others. He encouraged them to perform generous actions and random acts of
kindness, share meals with loved ones and, above all, hug one another as often as possible.

Participatory Budgeting

62

Participatory budgeting is a democratic process through which citizens or members of a community directly
determine how parts of a public budget—usually the discretionary funds—will be allocated and spent. The
process has been in existence since the late 1980s when it was put into use in the Brazilian city of Porto
Alegre, and is increasingly used around the world as a means of direct democracy and participatory
development.

With participatory budgeting now being introduced in parts of New York, the Lab held a workshop on
participatory budgeting to teach interested citizens what the process is, how it works, and to discuss what
potential it might hold in New York and other American cities.

Participatory Urbanism

63

Participatory urbanism is the condition, often facilitated by technology, in which citizens are empowered to
collect and contribute data, ideas, and proposals to city decision-makers. The idea is grounded in the fact
that community members are experts on their particular urban situations and contain within them the knowledge
and solutions for any number of issues. Participatory urbanism allows professionals to identify real needs and
tap into local knowledge and human resources rather than implementing change from the top down.

Celebration of All Things Cooperative highlighted the democratic potential of cooperatives. Worker
cooperatives from the area were invited to share strategies and stories, while acknowledging the cooperative’s
fundamental role in garnering citizen participation.

Peak Oil

64

The concept of peak oil—the point in time when global oil production reaches its highest point—emerged in the
mid-1950s when geophysicist and geologist Marion King Hubbert produced a graph predicting that US oil
production would reach its peak between 1966 and 1971. Though it remains debatable whether or not peak oil has
been or will be reached, the concept conveys recognition of crude oil’s status as a finite and
non-renewable resource.

The role that peak oil will play in the economic and environmental pressures guiding city development over
the coming decades inspired Renaissance or Long Emergency? A Debate on the City’s Future.

Personal Accountability

65

“Personal accountability” refers to an individual’s willingness to accept responsibility
for his or her own actions and the consequences that those actions have for him or herself, others, or the
greater public.

Artist and curator Ou Ning discussed the importance of individual action in finding and implementing
solutions to problems in the era of urbanization. The challenges we face are too great to be met by government
actions alone, he argued—we must accept our role as influencer and actor in both the problem and the
solution.

Protest

66

Protest is a direct action (peaceful or violent) in opposition to a situation, person, or idea for the
purpose of inciting change. Protests, which generally take place in the public realm, can take various forms
and range in size from the actions of a single person to mass demonstrations. In 2011, Time
magazine named “the protester” as their Person of the Year after people around the globe took to
the streets in support of equality, transparency, and justice. Historically, this form of public assembly has
impacted the way city planners design public space, either to facilitate public gatherings, or to easily
manage crowd control. For instance, in the nineteenth century, the Haussmann plan for Paris included, among
other urban planning measures, regulations to control the city’s long-standing tradition of subversive
street revolts.

A screening of The Starlite Project: We Came to Sweat and the
following discussion focused on the Starlite Lounge, an African American–owned gay bar in Crown Heights, and
the protests that ensued after the bar was given an eviction notice.

Public-Private Tension

67

Public-private tension is a condition that occurs in densely populated areas where personal space is limited.
Most prevalent in megacities like Mumbai, London, New York, and Tokyo, this tension is created through the
confluence of various factors such as small living quarters, lack of nature or public space, and overtaxed
public transportation. The increasing use of social media to display and share details of everyday life
further complicates this issue, making it a tension that extends beyond physical space into the digital
realm.

Public Space

68

A public space is a plot of land that is open and accessible to all people. Though often used to refer to
social spaces used for gathering or recreation, such as plazas or parks, “public space” also
refers to streets, sidewalks, and government buildings that are open to the public and not privately
owned.

Led by Greg Smithsimon, coauthor of The Beach Beneath the Streets, the Wall
Street Occupation Tour brought visitors to Zuccotti Park, a “bonus plaza” in Lower Manhattan.
Bonus plazas are privately owned public spaces that are designed in response to setback regulations for
skyscrapers.

Resilience

69

“Resilience” refers to a city’s ability to cope with and recover from hardship. Though a
city can show resilience in relation to a number of potential difficulties, a resilient city today is
typically defined as one that is prepared and equipped to contend with and mitigate the multiple effects of
climate change.

Greg Greene, director of both the documentary The End of Suburbia and
the ResilientCity project, hosted a panel discussion on how New Yorkers can build resilience into their
communities over the next twenty years and conducted a hands-on workshop with Crowdbrite inventor Darin
Dinsmore on using Crowdbrite for neighborhood-level resilience organization.

Segrification

70

“Segrification”—a combination of “gentrification” and “segregation”—describes
the phenomenon that occurs when rising rents cause families to move away or prevent individuals of diverse
socioeconomic brackets to have access to affordable housing. Segrification describes the process, common in
cities throughout the world, by which gentrification increases the cost of living, resulting in a diminishment
of racial and income diversity.

In two events, Lab Team members Elma van Boxel and Kristian Koreman of ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles]
discussed segrification and glocalism, and presented their conclusions after their time hosting the Lab in New
York.

Share Culture

71

Even though sharing is a concept as ancient as human culture itself, in recent years technology has enabled
sharing on an unprecedented level. Through community websites, live interface, and social media, sharing has
become a viable alternative to monetary exchange both online and offline. Sharing is most common in
transportation, infrequent-use items, and physical spaces. While sharing thrives on a peer-to-peer level, it
is also a logic that must be considered in city planning, to be implemented on a large scale as more people
demand carpooling, bike sharing, shared Internet connections, and other collective resources.

Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, gave a talk about how the confluence of
sustainability imperatives, economic stagnation, and digitally enabled creativity has given rise to a movement
of connected consumption.

Slowing Down

72

While modernist urban-planning philosophies typically focus on moving people and vehicles as quickly as
possible, “slowing down” refers to an alternative way of thinking: that some places and parts of a
city should be dedicated to a slower and more enjoyable, experiential way of moving through and being in the
city.

Architect Elizabeth Diller spoke at the Lab about architecture that enables and encourages people to slow
down and stop—such as New York’s High Line park—as a means of seeking, and designing for, comfort in
urban settings.

Social Design

73

Social design reminds designers of their responsibility toward society. Since we live in a social world
defined by interaction, it is natural that our actions have an impact on other people’s lives. Design
can be seen, therefore, as a tool to promote social change. The development of projects engaged with
communities, governments, and other organizations enables design to deal with social issues and commit to its
important role in society.

People Make Parks celebrated the launch of an interactive website that allows New Yorkers to participate in
the design of their parks. The website, peoplemakeparks.org, makes the New York City Department of Parks and
Recreation’s capital-projects design process accessible to community groups throughout the city.

Squatter

74

“Squatter” is a term used to describe someone who occupies empty and neglected properties.
Squatters in the East Village flourished in the 1970s and 1980s when they inhabited properties in order to
recover abandoned buildings and find low-cost shelter. Squatting can lead to the revitalization and
gentrification of previously neglected neighborhoods, thereby forcing out the very individuals who originally
built them up.

The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting Time Sit-In was a day-long event, organized by Jeanne van Heeswijk, that
invited activists from the Lower East Side for a sit-in to share squatting stories, strategies, and analysis
of spaces for formal and informal social interaction.

Storytelling

75

Before the development of written language, oral storytelling was the main method of passing on important
information, establishing forms of social norms by illustrating examples of behavior, and engaging our
imagination through true or fictional accounts. Today, despite the ubiquity of technology and other narrative
media, storytelling remains a powerful form of interpersonal communication. In cities, it can greatly
strengthen ties and foster local knowledge of a neighborhood, particularly when local stories are passed down
from older to younger generations.

The Storytelling Café advocated for storytelling as a model for social organizing and radical education, and
the singer/performance artist Justin Vivian Bond gathered local artists and community members together for an
evening of sharing personal histories.

Stranger Interaction

76

Stranger interaction is the willful engagement between people who have no previous relationship. This act of
spontaneity can have significant effects by interrupting the expected narratives of daily life, shifting
perspective, and forming unexpected connections.

Hello Stranger, with Kio Stark, was a workshop that gave visitors specific missions where talking with
strangers was mandatory. These exercises illustrated the powerful serendipities that can result when momentary
bonds are created through stranger interaction.

Street Facade

77

A street facade is the outer shell of a building or structure. Facing a street or sidewalk, this veneer
becomes the repository for an array of visual and aesthetic communication, ranging from personal statements
and graffiti to commercial signage and architectural interventions.

Testing, Testing! was an ongoing tour that measured a person’s physiological response to environmental
stimuli, crowdedness, and aesthetics. Contrary to popular conception, people tend to prefer the friendly
personality of old building facades to that of new, pristine developments.

Suburban Retrofitting

78

Suburban retrofitting is the act of filling in, redesigning, and adding to the fabric of existing suburbs to
make them denser, more urban, and sustainable. Examples of suburban retrofits can include the renovation of
abandoned malls or other large commercial buildings to create pedestrian shopping districts or public
amenities; dividing blocks to improve connectivity and walkability; and wrapping big-box buildings and parking
lots in long, shallow structures to create space for small shops that will provide continuous
streetscapes.

Visitors learned the key concepts and tools of suburban retrofitting in a hands-on design and charette
workshop conducted by June Williamson, coauthor of Retrofitting Suburbia, and Galina Tachieva, author of the Sprawl Repair Manual.

Suburban Sprawl

79

Suburban sprawl is a type of outward urban growth in the form of automobile-oriented, low-density
development. It has persisted in cities worldwide since around the end of World War II. Suburban sprawl is
typically characterized by single-family or other low-density housing structures; the segregation of
residential and commercial areas; and the conversion of agricultural or “greenfield” land to
residential use. The trend of suburban sprawl became a concern in the 1980s, and this type of suburban
development has begun to slow down and shift toward a model of denser urbanization.

Sprawl: Past, Present, Future was a multidimensional panel discussion and artistic exploration of the history
and present-day reality of the suburban sprawl phenomenon, and examined what the future might hold for the
world’s sprawling communities.

Toxic Neighborhoods

80

Just as the distribution of wealth is not equal across the cityscape, neither is the distribution of
environmental burdens such as garbage dumps, industrial processing facilities, hazardous waste sites, or other
environmental hazards. Toxic neighborhoods bear the majority of environmental burdens, and tend to be poorer
neighborhoods populated by minorities.

Environmental justice advocacy group United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park (UPROSE) conducted a
tour of some of New York’s toxic neighborhoods, including Red Hook and Sunset Park in South
Brooklyn.

Transportation Psychology

81

Transportation psychology is an emerging field that investigates the social psychology behind the actions and
attitudes of road and transportation users, as well as individual and social mobility issues and
management.

While both traffic and transportation psychology tend to focus heavily on automobile users, psychologist and
transportation-policy specialist Carlos Felipe Pardo explored and compared people’s perceptions (and the
psychological effects) of traveling by public transit or by foot in New York. The Transit Psychology Tour was
codesigned with Lab Team member Charles Montgomery.

Trash Mapping

82

Trash mapping is a strategy of following the path of waste to learn more about the consequences of
consumerism or to encourage accountability on the part of the waste infrastructure system. Trash mapping
reveals that a significant amount of industrial and household refuse is disposed in places far from their
original site of use. Sophisticated systems for tracking trash, like the one designed by MIT’s SENSEable
City Lab, revealed that trash is often sent by train and freight ship to places all over the world, especially
poorer countries that offer cheaper disposal.

Garbology toured New York’s five boroughs by bus, highlighting various types of waste processing plants
and garbage dumps. Trash Mappers, led by Barcelona- and Boston-based collective Basurama, empowered visitors
to analyze their own trash and think about where it would end up. In Actuating Cities, Assaf Bidermann
explained the potential of wireless connectivity in transforming how citizens will take part in programming
and improving their environment and in city governance. In particular, the Trash Track project showed the
waste-removal chain.

Trauma

83

“Trauma” is defined as a distressed psychological, behavioral, or physical state resulting from
severe mental or emotional strain or some kind of physical injury. In certain circumstances, such as war or
natural disaster, trauma can affect a social body as a whole, making lasting marks on the design and
development of a city.

During 9/11 Memorial and Museum: Collective Memory, Jake Barton of the design studio Local Projects explained
the methodology behind his design for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. He discussed the algorithm he created to
process and display the names of those honored by the memorial.

Trust

84

Effective urban relationships are largely based on notions of trust, rather than systems that rely on
control. While strategies of trust imply uncertainty about the outcomes—which can prove challenging for
some—they are also known to benefit process-driven thinking and experimentation. Trust leads to more convivial
cities in ever more diverse urban contexts.

Participants in the Love Night event were tasked to challenge their inhibitions and engage in trusting
encounters with strangers.

Unconscious Perception

85

Unconscious perception represents the automated processes the body goes through to take in the surrounding
environment and its metaphysical status. While our five senses help us perceive the physical world,
unconscious perception connects us to the realm of intuition.

To shed light on how we are influenced by this dimension of our minds, artist Dan Graham spoke about his
practice, which challenges our perceptions of space through performance, installations, video, sculpture,
photography, and writing.

Urban Beauty

86

Urban beauty is the subjective assessment of the aesthetic values of a city. Some argue that allowing layers
of history and urban decay to be revealed produces the ultimate urban aesthetic. Others prefer new, pristine
developments that are clean, orderly, and employ the newest technology or building techniques. This
multiplicity of perspectives, and the patchwork that the city becomes as a result, is the ultimate
manifestation of urban beauty.

Testing, Testing! was an experiment co-designed by Lab Team member Charles Montgomery and environmental
psychologist Colin Ellard to measure the mental, emotional, and physiological effects of various types of
urban environments. Green spaces proved calming to participants, and elicited positive emotions and higher
levels of concentration.

Urban Data

87

Urban data is the information that cities produce, which is measured and turned into facts, figures, and
visualizations. According to Eric Schmidt, executive chairman and former CEO of Google, the amount of data
collected between the dawn of humanity and 2003 is equivalent to the amount we now produce every two days.
This phenomenon of massively proliferating data, increasingly referred to as “big data,” comes
with the task of filtering and making accessible this new wealth of information.

Assaf Biderman, associate director of the MIT SENSEable City Lab, shared a presentation about how digital
devices allow us to capture information in real time about our cities. This urban data has enhanced our
ability to make smarter design decisions.

Urban Foraging

88

Urban foraging is the practice of harvesting indigenous, seasonal food in cities. From finding food from more
conventional sources such as fruit trees to the advanced science of identifying edible weeds and mushrooms,
urban foraging allows for cheap, sustainable nourishment. Urban foraging is about finding, identifying, and
consuming food that is growing with little or no human intervention. (Care should be taken to avoid eating
plants that grow in heavily polluted areas.) More broadly speaking, the practice of urban foraging can refer
to recovering any reusable item from the street or dumpster, such as discarded food, furniture, or raw
materials.

Dutch researcher/consultant Michiel Schwarz and facilitator Vincent Rump of FreedomLab Future Studies shared
a vision of the future in which sustainability, localism, and social connectivity take precedence and new
principles of sustainability shape everything from design, food, and our environment to consumption,
community, and our sense of place. Live Feeds FeedForward Fieldwork 10: A Nonconsumer Wandering, Gleaning, and
Foraging was an urban foraging walk led by spurse, a creative collective.

Urban Games

89

Urban games are played with the city as a backdrop, either in single or multiple urban locations. They use
the city as a playground and aim to bring a traditionally enclosed experience to the street. Urban games are
intended to be experiential and promote social interaction in a real-life setting. They can adopt the analog
form of a human-scale urban board game and may be enhanced by the use of location technology.

Urbanology is an interactive urban game developed by the New York Lab. Urbanology is available to play online
at the Lab’s website, and could originally be played at the New York Lab’s site on First Street
and Second Avenue. The game empowers its users to act as city planners for a day, lobbying for various
initiatives regarding innovation, transportation, health, affordability, wealth, lifestyle, sustainability,
and livability. The game experience for Urbanology was developed by Local Projects, and the physical design
was created by ZUS [Zones Urbaines Sensibles].

Urban Inequality

90

Urban inequality—disparity in access to jobs, opportunities, housing, education, services, and amenities in
an urban setting—exists in all cities. Political, historical, and social determinants are all factors in the
emergence and persistence of urban inequity, where the powerful and wealthy often dictate city development
schemes and laws that benefit the upper-class minority. It plays a role in urban citizens’ well-being
and is commonly evidenced in cities as residential segregation (also a feature of suburban areas) and
disparities in the quality of urban schools. The cumulative result is a city divided by class, race, and
economic background.

Free Community Health Care Day challenged notions of urban inequality through workshops led by Third Root
Community Health Center. The sessions demonstrated how it is possible to bring affordable, community-based
health services to everyone, including those who would otherwise have little or no access to such healing
modalities.

Urban Intervention

91

“Urban intervention” refer to activities that disrupt the habitual functioning of a city. They
are typically performed by artists or activists. Ranging from street art and design challenges to ephemeral
gatherings, flash mobs, and celebrations, this type of activity achieves a temporary social cohesiveness and
surprise factor that urban dwellers crave.

In the hands-on workshop Smart ­Living in a World of Multiple Modernities, FreedomLab’s Thieu
Besselink explained how small-, medium-, and large-scale interventions are the keys to effecting change.

Urban Livability

92

“Urban livability” refers to a level of well-being based on various measurable criteria in an
urban setting. Mercer’s Quality of Living Survey rates major cities based on various criteria including
political and social environment, economic environment, and medical and health considerations, among
others.

Video artist Kelly Loudenberg’s New Urbanism is a video
series that explores imaginative and sustainable solutions for urban living, from rooftop farming to dumpster
swimming pools and underground opera houses. Traveling around the world, she highlighted small-scale
interventions by designers and architects that improved urban livability.

Urban Meditation

93

Urban meditation describes the cultivation of awareness in a busy urban setting. The practice has the
possibility of increasing social connectedness and belongingness in environments that otherwise promote
agitation and alienation. By practicing guided meditation or repeating positive mantras, the chaos of an urban
setting can be transformed into fuel for spiritual enlightenment.

I Meditate NY offered visitors a weekly meditation session in the Lab during its ten-week run.

Urban Mobility

94

“Urban mobility” refers to the ability to get oneself from point A to point B in an urban
environment. The options for city transport are varied and include walking, biking, and other forms of
privately or publicly operated transportation. Expanding populations, urban sprawl, and the dangerous effects
of carbon dioxide are all issues to consider when addressing the challenges and opportunities related to urban
mobility. Encouraging multi-mobility systems that incorporate walking, car sharing, bike sharing, public
transportation networks, and new city design that reduces commuting are examples of strategies designed to
improve urban mobility.

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery led a conversation between Traffic author Tom Vanderbilt, transit psychologist Carlos Felipe
Pardo, and Alejandro de Castro Mazarro from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture
Planning and Preservation, as they offered insights into the psychology of commuting and urban mobility.

Urban Psychology

95

Urban psychology is the study of our environment and how it affects us. Urban psychology studies the effects
of cities and urban living on people’s mental health and well-being by addressing a variety of areas
such as urban fatigue, stress, overstimulation, fear, anxiety, happiness, and our relationship to space.

Lab Team member Charles Montgomery discussed multiple studies and concepts considered by the field of urban
psychology during his talk, Comfort, Cities, and the Science of Happiness. Montgomery argued that by providing
a physical space for the psychology of happiness and urbanism to meet, the design of our cities interacts with
the design of our brains. When you design a city to be happy, you simultaneously design one that is green and
resilient—even if that was not the original intention.

Urban Salons

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Urban salons are neighborhood gatherings that allow for local inhabitants to share resources, skills, and
stories relating to city life and their neighborhoods. Bringing together individuals for socializing and
learning in someone’s home can create stronger personal bonds and connections.

The New York Lab’s Sunday Salon Series consisted of five events hosted by long-time East Village
resident and activist Clayton Patterson.

Urban Sensory Experience

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Urban sensory experience speaks to the vastly complicated network of human senses and interactions—generated
by the interplay between individuals and groups, by one’s own physical sensory system, and by the
experience of the physical layout and appearance of city spaces—that impact the way one perceives and moves
through the city. These obvious and sometimes undetected stimuli shape our everyday decision-making and
well-being (consciously and subconsciously). Being more attuned to how the built environment can affect
citizens’ decisions and well-being may inform future urban design in a positive way.

Testing, Testing!, an ongoing guided tour that took participants through a variety of urban landscapes,
gathered evidence about the psychological and physiological effects of public space on our minds and
bodies.

Urban Sound

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“Urban sound” refers to the vast range of sounds that the city produces. From the rhythm of the
steam engine to the drone of the automobile, the sound of cities has always been a defining characteristic of
urban life. While these sounds have served as creative inspiration over decades for various artists, from the
Futurists to John Cage, they can also contribute to overstimulation. Through recent developments in
technology, sound can also be harnessed as a valuable tool for measuring various data sets in the city.

Sound Sweep was a variety show dedicated to the sounds of New York, organized by Audio Visual Arts (AVA) and
comedian Greg Barris. The show addressed issues of noise pollution, noise prevention, sonic comfort levels,
and quiet zones in New York.

Urban Spontaneity

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The term “urban spontaneity” refers to the importance of occasionally engaging in unpredictable
actions in our cities, as opposed to moving through them with expected, predictable patterns of behavior. The
element of surprise is an important one in discovering new ways of seeing our streets. Actions like flash
mobs, street dancing, impromptu conversations with strangers, and unplanned behaviors in our everyday lives
play an important role in our sense of ownership of our own streets and help promote a healthy connection to
our sense of freedom and expression in public space.

Kio Stark, a self-described “independent learning activist,” engaged visitors in a discussion
about what happens when we interrupt the expected narratives of daily life through random encounters with
strangers.

Urban Systems

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Urban systems are the various elements of urban infrastructure that make cities function. By analyzing these
systems as one unitary entity, urban problems can be redefined and conventional disciplinary boundaries can be
overcome. The realization of this overarching unity between systems—those related to decision-making and
government, housing, waste, transportation—necessitates a rethinking of the way cities run, allowing for a
more holistic approach.

Infrastructure of Waste and Water–A Recap and Analysis was a talk by Lab Team member Olatunbosun Obayomi that
explored how city infrastructure can benefit by an integration of infrastructure systems. Obayomi, a waste
specialist, gave examples about how neighborhood waste-processing units—which are integrated with
transportation, water, and power networks—can improve the functions of the city at large.

100 Urban Trends: A Glossary of Ideas from the BMW Guggenheim Lab New York

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The BMW Guggenheim Lab was launched in New York’s First Park, a New York City Parks property in the East
Village. During its ten-week stay in the city, from August 3 to October 16, 2011, the Lab functioned as a platform to
offer free tours, workshops, debates, roundtable discussions, screenings, performances, experiments, and the New York
Comfort Lecture Series, which invited a series of urban thinkers to give their views on a variety of city topics.
The programs at the New York Lab focused on the topic of Confronting Comfort and analyzed cities as organic and
interconnected systems.

As part of the culmination of the Lab’s experience in New York, this glossary aims to identify 100 of the most
talked-about trends in urban thinking that played a role during the Lab’s first American venue. These terms and
their definitions aim to document and take the “temperature” of a particular time and place — New York in
the summer and fall of 2011— and to understand what city experts and non-experts alike gathered to discuss: what
cities were, are, and can be. Each definition concludes with an example of a New York Lab program that illustrated the
relevance and context of each term.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. One hundred of them, discussed
at the New York Lab, follow.

New York City

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The BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in New York from August 3 to October 16, 2011.

Over the past two years, the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a mobile urban laboratory centered around the topic of life in cities today, has offered free programs and workshops and implemented urban projects in New York City (August 3–October 16, 2011), Berlin (June 15–July 29, 2012), and Mumbai (December 9–January 20, 2013). Created as a resource, 100 Urban Trends aims to identify the most talked-about trends in urban thinking, as they were discussed in these three venues. Each individual glossary offers 100 contextualized definitions that apply to the way we understand, design, and live in cities.

Integral to 100 Urban Trends is the concept of cities as “idea makers.” In cities, people come together, share their thoughts and common interests, and generate the ideas that shape our world. Dense, growing cities have been and continue to be the catalyst for human progress, powered by daily proximity among their citizens as much as anything else. Despite some of the drawbacks of such massive urban centers, they may well embody the future for human life. Today’s cities are competing to attract more people; greater urban density can mean more conflict, but it can also produce a greater diversity of viewpoints and more opportunity for positive change.

In recent years, there has been an unequivocal shift in the study of cities. Urban thinking, whether related to architecture or urbanism, has become dramatically less focused on infrastructure, and more on the ultimate goal and reason for the existence of cities — that is, the well-being of the people that inhabit them and constitute their very soul and essence. “Cluster,” “concentrate,” and “collaborate” seem to have become the three big Cs of urban thinking of late — but that story is not new. Clustering, searching for a concentration of people, and finding ways to collaborate have been part of the human experience since prehistoric times. Then, as now, people gathered in search of protection, conviviality, and exchange.

The terms presented here reflect this type of urban exchange. They are new and old, classic and ephemerally fashionable. Among them are some of urbanism’s “usual suspects,” which interestingly, keep reappearing in the urban discourse of the early twenty-first century. Each definition concludes with an example of a Lab program that illustrated the relevance and context of that term. Some terms are shared between the three glossaries, as they proved relevant in all of the Lab’s locations.

What do people talk about today when they discuss the future of cities? Many things. Find some of them here—and tell us about the Urban Trends people are talking about now in your city.